Augmented Reality has existed as a diverse market for more than 15 years, with customized applications in industrial automation, theme parks, sports television, military displays, and online marketing. Recently, an entirely new mass market has opened up in mobile handsets, due to the availability of video cameras, processors, GPS data, compasses, and accelerometers on handset platforms.

But what exactly is Augmented Reality (AR) ?

AR is a term for a live direct or indirect view of a physical, real-world environment whose elements are augmented by computer-generated sensory input, such as sound or graphics. It combines real and virtual, is interactive in real time and is registered in 3D.

So basically, Augmented Reality is adding realtime information to what you see and, eventually, to what you hear.

AR is a sub-domain of Computer Vision (the science and technology of machines that see, where see in this case means that the machine is able to extract information from an image that is necessary to solve some task) which also includes scene reconstruction, event detection, video tracking, object recognition, learning, indexing, motion estimation, and image restoration. Note that, in a certain way, Computer Vision can be considered as a sub-domain of Artificial Intelligence.

Generally, the basic components of an AR system are:

- an input device (such as a camera / webcam)

- a display device (head–mounted displays, handheld displays, and spatial displays)

- a tracking software running on a computer (or a mobile computer).

NeuroSystems has developed a powerful realtime OpenGL AR technology for interactive kiosks and other graphics system running under operating system Microsoft Windows.

We are currently in the process of adapting this technology to mobile devices (OpenGL ES 2.0).