AR Consortium Announced

On July 7th, 2009, an Augmented Reality Consortium was announced.  The AR Consortium is made up of eight international companies: Int13, Metaio, Mobilizy, Neogence Enterprises, Ogmento, SPRX Mobile, Tonchidot, and Total Immersion.  The goals of the AR Consortium are:

The AR Consortium’s goals include providing a forum for members to meet, share ideas, and discuss issues facing the growth of the industry, as well as open a dialog about emerging standards and protocols.

This is an important step and one that Ori Inbar, the CEO of Ogmento, mentioned recently during a UgoTrade.com interview.  By getting the major players together, they can help ensure that we don’t end up with a fragmented system that can’t talk to each other, making development of third party applications more difficult. 

The AR Consortium site has further explained their plans including a limited AR forums and an annual rotating conferance in a new post.  I’m also hoping we hear more from Ori Inbar himself on his Games Alfresco site (more than the blurb we got in a different post).     

I’m excited about the announcement.  While putting plans into concrete action are more difficult than agreeing to vague goals, the existence of the Consortium gives promise to the smooth expansion of this future-technology. 

All the recent browser releases and this announcement reminds me of the feeling I had when I first used a Netscape browser back in 1992 (if my memory of the year is correct).  The possibilities seemed endless upon my intial exploration of the Internet back then (though the pace of browsing was frustratingly slow).  Seventeen years later, I’ve seen many innovations that have answered the promise of those initial dreams.  I’m sure in seventeen more years, I’ll look at this time period with the same fondness I did when I first used a Netscape browser.

Interesting times.