These series of guest posts are written by the teams attending the Tetuan Valley Startup School Fall edition. The Silver team, formed by Hector Criado and Fernando Alonso, is presenting their project, SolAR.
Science fiction is at your fingertips, we are not , teleportation or Scarlet Johansson, but about augmented reality (AR), merging information to the real-world, by superimposing data and computer-based graphics over a display.
Lately, AR has gone out from R&D labs and universities to our desktops. Its main application has been on advertising and games jump to the outside world and it will become part of our daily life pretty soon through smartphones and similar handled devices.
GPS geo-location, device orientation, image recognition and internet connectivity to get maps, real time-data and other information are some of the features which are approaching the AR to the smartphones. And some European entrepreneurs and companies are into it right now:
Layar is a free application developed in Netherlands which displays real time digital information about the surrounding area by switching between different layers as diverse as Internet: from corporative to personalized layers. Layar is open to developers to make their own layers to help users to find their way trough the city: from real-state to medical assistance.
A similar project, but focused on tourism is WIKITUDE World Browser, from the Austrian company Mobilizy, which displays information from Internet sources like Wikipedia, Qype and Panoramio, and Wikitude.me.
Tat’s Augmented ID comes from Sweden and offers face identification and personal data like e-mail, telephone numbers or social application’s profile.
AR gaming opens an interesting field for handled devices. The Spanish studio Novorama was awarded on the last E3 for their game Invizimals on innovation and technical excellence for PSP. The aim of Invizimals is track, capture and make combat small, Pokemon-like creatures. A similar approach , in this case for smartphones, has been taken by French company int13 is developing an AR game for mobiles called Kweekies
With all these different applications, we thought: why don’t apply AR to solar energy and show exactly the different sun paths – high curves on summer, low curves in winter, and the current path for today – depending on our location on Earth? In this way, solar systems orientation might be easily calculated and power output might be maximized for a given timeframe.
