Why physical businesses need Stardust
By: Neogoma Stardust
Tags: Stardust Sdk, Neogama, Ar Cloud, Augmented Reality, Computer Vision

Augmented reality today

When we started to explore Augmented reality 3 years ago, coming from a VR background, we didn’t expect AR & VR to be so different. As a matter of fact, basic skill sets are similar, both in terms of asset creation, engine used or even deployment platform (most commonly used phones support both AR and VR). Back then, iOS’s ARkit and Android’s ARcore just got released, paving the way for mass adoption. Vuforia, Kudan, Blippar and other big players were also offering solutions to developers, but from a user point of view, everything remained “gimmicky”. No offense to Pokemon GO (excellent game but not an AR game), Just a Line (short-lived line in space), YouCam (virtual makeup), Houzz or IKEA places (visualizing furniture), Snapchat/IG/FB or every virtual try-on experience for shoes, dresses, glasses or hats and many more AR developers out there. They all play a role in building spatial computing, but the hype has been too big to match users’ expectations…

Image from arvrjourney.com

Speaking about the hype, every geek, techy and innovator is waiting for smart glasses which could eventually replace our smartphones. Well funded startups like Magic leap, Nreal or Madgaze, just to name a few, are competing with Microsoft’s Hololens, Google Glass or Apple glass (if they finally come in 2021 or 2022). As exciting as those glasses can be, we won’t see a mass adoption before years.

SO WHAT’S MISSING IN AUGMENTED REALITY?

Using a smartphone to add a virtual object or information to a packaging, a face or a floor is now very easy, but augmenting an entire physical space is much harder. The difficulty comes from enabling a phone camera to recognize the physical world despite its constant changes. In other words, making sure the camera can “locate itself” in space.

“Computer vision engineers have been knocking their heads on the wall for decades to solve that localisation issue” — LC, a good friend at Alibaba

Think about how our eyes are doing it: if you move objects, change the color of your walls, add 100 people in a conference room, you’re still able to know where you are. That’s because our brain has been trained for years to perform that task almost instantly, processing important information and discarding what’s not. Over time, our brains retain some information, a process called visual memory. The short-term version of visual memory is most important in moment-to-moment construction and stabilization of the visual world.

The traditional approach to replicate this extremely efficient eyes-brain mechanism has been to use point clouds, initially extracted by depth sensors such as Lidar and now also provided by Apple’s ARKit and Google’s ARCore. This approach does work over a short period, typically a few minutes to a few hours. Apple’s World Map, Google’s Cloud Anchors, Azure Spatial Anchors are some examples. But the point cloud approach has many limits, namely its short-lived use-cases. If you’re a business and want to provide information or experiences to your visitors, investing a non-persistent content might not be very appealing.

Introducing Stardust visual positioning SDK

Stardust chose a different path by harnessing some of the most powerful AI algorithms to provide a long-term solution to the localisation challenge. We’ll dig in another post about those algorithms, but in a nutshell, we map multiple times and train our model ~ a form of biomimetics.

Stardust SDK logo: an N, an arrow, a location point or a turtle?

With that in mind and looking at Stardust SDK logo, you’ve probably guessed what the technology enables. Hyper-accurate positioning, visual navigation, but also persistent content in space and in theory real-time multiplayer experiences and games (in theory because we’re not that far on our roadmap, but all good things come to those who wait).

Why is Stardust visual positioning SDK a key piece to spatial computing and therefore a solution for physical businesses

Whether you’re a mall operator, an hospital, an airport, a theme park, a shop, a museum or gallery, a restaurant, a hotel, a public space, a school, a campus or a factory(to name a few), Stardust enables applications that weren’t even imaginable few months ago. At core Stardust offers:

#1 accurate visual positioning system

#2 natural 3D human interactions

#3 visual navigation 4# persistent content #5 multiplayer experiences #6 personalised interfaces #7 3D reconstruction #7 occlusion are just side features built upon #1 and #2.

How Stardust SDK works

BUILT FOR UNITY DEVELOPERS WITH BUSINESSES AND USERS IN MIND

Non-technical people don’t care about how it works, they just want to see it working. To that end, we’re developing an online editor which we hope will be as easy to use as MS PPT. It is an essential brick of our platform since it allows anyone to remotely drag and drop content in space. Visual navigation to various points of interest, information anchored in space, large scale immersive experiences, every piece of content is visible and editable from the online editor.

Work in progress, 3D point cloud to visualize the physical space from the online editor

SO WHY BUSINESSES NEED STARDUST

Let’s make it clear and simple. Stardust enables businesses to offer new services that we not technically feasible in the past. In a nutshell, any physical spaces / businesses can:

Offer a “3D GPS” with centimeter accuracy to indoor and outdoor places

Help visitors knowing where they are in those spaces

Guide visitors to their selected destinations

Overlay content (information, marketing, entertainment) on the top of the real world

More? We’d like to hear from your own industry expertise!

See below how this “accurate 3D GPS” locates users and guide them with visual navigation:

AR navigation and AR way-finding after being accurately

Conclusion

We obviously can’t list every single application and industry which will eventually use Stardust (or some of our friends and competitors, you can also check out ARWAY, VISUALIX, PLACENOTE OR IMMERSAL). However, given the number of business requests we’ve received recently, we believe Stardust is answering real business needs and therefore bringing AR to new heights.