While mobile apps have penetrated all recesses of life, the digital landscape is constantly finding ways to present simulated reality on our mobile screens. The emergence of Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR) has only broadened the scope of simulating reality and interactions for real-life uses. Augmented Reality is particularly interesting as it mixes real-world and digital environments to present a powerful and multifaceted reality.
Augmented reality by superimposing the virtual reality onto the visual reality of the physical world delivers a more immersive experience. Hence, it became so popular across mobile app niches that such experience can broaden the scope of interaction. Augmented reality apps are in all rage, and they are almost reshaping the entire mobile app development like never before.
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Benefits of using Augmented Reality apps
You need to begin with the benefits of Augmented Reality in mobile apps to understand the length of opportunities created by this technology for developers and businesses. Some professional application builder programmer is also working hand in hand with government and administrative agencies to implement augmented reality apps for public works such as security monitoring, creating a simulated environment for administrative planning, etc.
Here are some of the key benefits of Augmented Reality mobile apps from the perspective of both users and developers.
1. It helps improve the user experience with more interactive elements.
2. It lowers down the gap between physical and the digital world to create an immersive experience.
3. AR also helps to integrate location-based information and location tracking feature more realistically into the app.
4. For developers and apps, publishers, Augmented Reality offers a new opportunity to optimize user engagement.
5. It helps mobile apps across the niches to deliver sophisticated user experience simply by broadening the real-world experience with AR elements.
Key challenges that make implementing Augmented Reality easier
While the internet and the digital universe were full of buzz about the never-before opportunity presented by Augmented Reality applications, there are several challenges to the implementation of this technology as well. Having a clear understanding of these challenges is crucial for the developers of AR apps.
1. In spite of the fact, that thanks to new technologies the interaction between digital applications and people has enhanced, human interaction in society tremendously suffered.
2. As far as the location tracking feature is concerned, it hardly performs accurately in indoor locations.
3. As augmented reality apps integrate social profiles on the app screen, simply by pointing fingers on them, one can access their social profile. This often threatens the privacy of users.
How Augmented Reality apps really work?
Now to understand the role of augmented reality for mobile app development, it is important to know the multiple ways it can be implemented. While we can concentrate on various niches and the way AR is used for them, we first need to focus on the accompanying interfaces to understand Augmented Reality.
Simulating real-life 3D objects
The real-life objects of any particular environment can be turned into 3D objects, and a simulated environment can be created with them.
For instance, your own room with all its objects can be recreated with 3D effects right on your device screen, and then the simulated visual can guide you about placing furniture to create more space and to make it look more attractive. An AR app can achieve this either by using trackers or without it.
Browsers showing user location
Through the web browser, the location of a user can be tracked only to display the same on the screen and deliver contents based on the location of the user.
A game environment with real-life interactions
The latest and the most impressive example of Augmented Reality apps in the games is the Pokemon Go that almost created a sensation world over right from the beginning. The game made the whole globe a playground as it requires you moving around the real-life spaces in search of game characters.
Location-based AR apps
This is the most popular augmented reality app niche that actively utilizes location features of your mobile device including compass, GPS, and accelerometer. All these sensors collect data about your whereabouts, and the location data is displayed on the image captured by your device camera.
Marker-based AR
This is another popular way of implementing augmented reality into mobile apps. This method utilizes markers like QR codes to create digital overlays over the real-world camera-view. This is also widely known as recognition-based AR. As per this method, the information shows up over an image as soon as the mobile device detects a marker.
Markerless AR
It is the most advanced Augmented Reality technology that uses sophisticated algorithms for detecting a real-world image instantly with all data and display it with the image overlay. This technology of implementing augmented reality has only been utilized sparsely by few advanced hardware, and it is still not in widespread use across the spectrum of apps.
Conclusion
From mobile eCommerce or retail to apps for a better in-store shopping experience to real estate and travel apps, augmented reality has already penetrated across all types and niches of mobile apps. It is increasingly being relied upon to bolster sophistication into mobile apps and is no longer just limited to gaming apps.
