OGC, Metaio, Layar and Wikitude invite MWC attendees to AR interoperability demo

MUNICH, GERMANY: The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) invites all mobile developers, location data providers, network operators and LBS service users to an exciting seminar and reception that will be held from 0900 to 1500 on 25 February 2014 in Barcelona, Spain at the Institut Cartogràfic de Catalunya (ICC) during the Mobile World Congress.

The Mobile World Congress, to be held 24-27 February 2014 in Barcelona, is the world's largest exhibition, conference and networking event for mobile operators, cell phone and device manufacturers, and providers of mobile software.

In addition to presentations by OGC representatives about location standards that maximize the value of mobile devices' location awareness, the OGC will host the world's first Augmented Reality (AR) Browser Interoperability Demonstration. Layar, Metaio and Wikitude, the largest AR platform providers, have co-operated to make it easy for AR content to be shared across their technology platforms.

This co-operation has resulted in the development of three unreleased but fully functioning browsers from the three companies. The demonstration of AR content being used interchangeably by these browsers will take place after lunch on Tuesday Feb 25 at the ICC during the OGC mobile seminar.

The common AR interchange format that enables this AR interoperability is based on the candidate OGC ARML 2.0 Encoding Standard that Martin Lechner of Wikitude introduced into the OGC, with the goal to provide an interchange format for Augmented Reality. After it has been successfully tested in the interoperability experiment, ARML 2.0 will be reviewed by the OGC membership to become an adopted OGC standard within the next couple of months.

The companies demonstrating AR interoperability believe tomorrow's AR market will be much more open, and thus much larger, than today's AR market. Today, a user equipped with an AR-ready device, including sensors and appropriate output/display support, must download a proprietary application to experience content published using an AR experience authoring platform. A subset of these applications are referred to as "AR browsers."