Virtual Office Resource

Augmented and virtual reality generated a ton of excitement just a few months ago. But now much of that has become muted as this space has moved from a high to what’s sometimes called the trough of disillusionment.

But whatever your read is on the mood around AR and VR, the fact remains that attendance at this year’s Virtual Reality World Congress was larger than the last. And advancements on the AR and VR fronts continue.

Twilio (News - Alert) is one company that is helping move augmented reality forward – at least from a developer standpoint. It has introduced new additions to its Programmable Video platform to address multiuser augmented reality.

The platform features low latency media servers, which are globally distributed. They provide client side control over audio and video layout and spatialization. And they do not do transcoding or mixing of audio and video, so they are lower latency than multipoint control unit media server technology.

What’s new are DataTrack and Media Sync application programming interfaces.

Twilio’s new DataTrack API shares metadata between endpoints. That means there’s no need for a separate communications channel.

Media Sync APIs, meanwhile, allow developers to synchronize AR metadata with real time media. That allows for accurate plaback of video and AR objects. This capability will be available soon for Twilio’s SDKs for iOS and Android (News - Alert).

These APIs can be leveraged to create AR applications for a wide variety of industries. That includes architectural, consumer goods repair, gaming, industrial, and medical applications.

"Augmented reality is completely transforming the way we understand and interact with the world around us, especially in terms of remote collaboration," said Rob Brazier, director of product for Twilio's Programmable Video platform. "Imagine if the next time you called your cable company, you could simply show them a video of the flashing lights on your cable box and they could instantly know what's wrong, and then guide you through the process of wiring it up correctly by overlaying the correct cabling on-screen in your physical space. The prospects for improving remote support and sales conversations is incredible."