Eye Tracking and Augmented Reality: An Interview With Metaio CEO
In Tish Sute’s interview with Metaio CEO, Thomas Alt, the current state of augmented reality and where it is going is explored. Thomas Alt shares everything from the history of his company, to cluing us in on what they have in store for us. While we here at ETU missed the Inside AR event, hosted by Metaio in Munich, Germany, we are excited to read about what is new in a field that seems like an excellent bedfellow for eye-tracking.
Metaio is a company that was founded in 2003 by two friends and associates, Thomas Alt and Peter Meier, after winning a business plan competition. Both founders met while working on their degrees (a PhD for Alt and Masters for Meier, both in Augmented Reality). After meeting, the two became friends and decided that they needed to start a business based around augmented reality. They entered a business plan competition, and won 25,000 Euros, which just happens to be the amount of money required to found a business in Germany. Now, in 2003, they have 64 employees, and have a presence in the US, and a venture company in South Korea.
They have two main products, Junaio and Unifeye, the first being their consumer brand, and the latter being focused on the business to business customers. Junaio is itself, a platform that will allow anyone with some programming knowledge, to begin programming applications for it. The Junaio platform is currently for the PC/MAC, iPhone and Android platforms, and allows the programmer to create programs that the end user can use to interact with his/her environment. Whether it is a game that augments reality, or uses reality as part of its mechanics, or it is a program that lets the user take a guided tour through a city or museum, Junaio has the ability to create a large number of applications.
The most interesting part of this interview, was Alt’s views on where the AR industry is going. While there is definitely value to Head Mounted Display technology, it has a long way to go before it can be used to truly augment reality, but it remains useful for virtual environments. The future, according to Alt, is in mobile devices such as cellphones or pad/slate devices such as the iPad. Since many of these devices have built in cameras and a decent amount of processing power, users are able to take snap shots of their environments, or use their cameras in real time to bring up useful information on their phones. Alt believes that people have little to no problem lifting their pad/slate device and using it to add an extra layer to what they see around them.
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