14 September 2011. The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC®) announces the formation of the OGC ARML 2.0 Standards Working Group (SWG).
ARML (Augmented Reality Markup Language) 1.0 is a descriptive, XML based data format for mobile Augmented Reality (AR) applications. ARML focuses on mapping georeferenced Points of Interest (POIs) and their metadata. Defined in late 2009, ARML was developed by the creators of the Wikitude World Browser to enable developers to create content for Augmented Reality browsers.
The work program for the OGC ARML 2.0 SWG is to expand the definition of ARML v1.0 in several ways, such as enabling dynamic modification of properties, event handling, sophisticated 3D visualizations and audio or haptic representation, and also enabling connection to other widely used AR tracking methods, including audio tracking. The SWG will be soliciting public comment on their work as well as collaborating with a number of participating AR experts, AR stakeholders, and representatives of other standards development organizations.
“We see this as an important step toward establishing an open ecosystem for mobile augmented reality,” said Martin Lechner, CTO at Wikitude. “More than a thousand developers throughout the world already use the ARML 1.0 which we first introduced to the industry not long ago. Wikitude natively supports ARML and we are looking forward to working with others to make ARML an adopted OGC standard that enables AR applications to connect well with thousands of other OGC-compliant geospatial resources.”
The charter members of the ARML 2.0 SWG are: Feng Chia University, University of Alabama Huntsville, CACI, Wikitude and Salzburg University. These OGC members invite the participation of AR developers, location based services (LBS) developers, AR service providers and browser vendors, location based content developers and publishers, companies seeking to be represented in AR applications, and game developers. The ARML 2.0 charter, which includes technical details about the scope and intent of ARML 2.0, is available at https://portal.ogc.org/files/?artifact_id=45439.
The first official meeting of the working group will be held Monday, 19 September 2011 at the OGC Technical Committee meeting in Boulder, CO in September 2011.
The OGC is an international consortium of more than 420 companies, government agencies, research organizations, and universities participating in a consensus process to develop publicly available geospatial standards. OGC Standards support interoperable solutions that “geo-enable” the Web, wireless and location-based services, and mainstream IT. OGC Standards empower technology developers to make geospatial information and services useful with any application that needs to be geospatially enabled. Visit the OGC website at http://www.opengeospatial.org/contact.
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