▲Gear VR, Samsung


Augmented Reality (AR), together with Virtual Reality (VR), is now becoming part of our everyday lives by merging with smart-phones or commercialized HMD. According to Korean Intellectual Property Office (KIPO), the number of patent applications for AR has increased by around 12 times for the last 10 years.


▲Patent application trend for AR technology (2005-2014)

Fields with the greatest number of patent applications for AR are education (13.4%), medical (11.6%), culture (9.0%), sports (8.0%), and broadcasting and advertisement (8.6%). Meanwhile, some fields including industry (18.0%), games (17.0%) and military (5.2%) have more number of patent applications for VR than for AR.


▲Patent application ratio of AR and VR by field (2005-2014)

During the period from 2010 to 2014, 436 technologies which use IoT to combine real-time information with AR have applied for patent: the number of technologies to combine AR and IoT for smart car application, smart home-related technologies to control consumer electronics at home, and AI technologies to control AR and IoT recorded 148(around 40%), 107 (24.5%) and 39 (8.9%), respectively. The rest accounted for 142 (32.6%).

AR technology used in smart car can be combined with V2V (Vehicle to Vehicle) and V2M (Vehicle to Machine) functionalities to display information on vehicles’ Head Up Displays (HUDs) or front transparent displays so that drivers can grasp the road and traffic condition intuitively.

 
▲Patent application ratio of combined AR and IoT technologies (2010-2014)

Hee-Tae Kim, Chief of Machining System Examination Division, KIPO, said that “in the future, it is very likely that AR or VR technologies are going to be combined with IoT, AI, big data, etc. to produce next-generation platform capable of intelligent services, which will provide users with context-aware contents or real-time, interactive data adaptive to changing environment.”