Author: Vishy Nirakari / Source: VentureBeat
Soon you will be able to aim your smartphone at a restaurant window, and the available reservation times will instantly pop up on your screen. If you don a pair of 5G-enabled glasses, you will be able to see the weekly promotions at your local supermarket through your lenses before you set foot in the store.
This is the world augmented reality (AR) promises to deliver.But despite the boom of software development kits such as Apple’s ARKit, Google’s ARCore, Amazon Sumerian, and the continued development of Microsoft’s Mixed Reality ecosystem, the uptake of consumer AR has been slow.
One reason for the slow uptake is that the current infrastructure is not robust enough to support the mass adoption of AR. Pokémon Go — the AR game that launched to mass hysteria in summer 2016 — showed the limitations of the current cloud infrastructure for AR. When the search for rare Pokémon drove huge crowds to one location, it strained network bandwidth and caused slowdowns and outages. (The inaugural Pokémon Go Fest, which gathered 20,000 users in Chicago, suffered from exactly these problems.)
That is why John Hanke, CEO of Niantic, the group behind the game, is investing in the AR Cloud — a 3D virtual map that is overlaid on the real world, where information and experiences are tied to specific physical locations. That means users can visually search the internet in real time. It’s a bit like Google searching the world around you just by looking at it.
However, an AR Cloud needs the right infrastructure to support it — and right now, how that infrastructure will get built is an open question. Some experts predict that the AR Cloud will represent a bigger shift in technology than the introduction of smartphones. One thing is certain: In order to deliver this AR-enabled future through the AR Cloud, we will need to dramatically rethink how the internet is built.
Cloud computing isn’t ready for the AR Cloud
Over the years, the internet has shifted from being mostly text to mostly image to mostly video. All of those pieces of media could be created and shared anywhere on the planet. That’s why the cloud infrastructure was built up through a combination of cloud storage solutions like Amazon’s AWS and content delivery networks (CDNs)…
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