Homo Synergeia: 5 Areas Where AR Merges the Artificial and Human Intelligence By Vadim Nekhai, CEO at Banuba AR development company

According to Global Market Insights, the augmented reality spend will reach $165 billion by 2024. With AR adoption, augmented reality and augmented intelligence are two components which have a potential to trigger the transformation of Homo sapiens into the Homo synergeia. What exactly does that mean? Humans of the future will have more advanced mental capacity than we do due to a synergy of artificial and human intelligence. Let's take a look at the role of AR in that transformation.

SOCIAL INTERACTION

Mobile apps unite people over long distances, but divide them over short ones. People don't talk to each other, focusing on screens. The recent survey shows that many adults spend more hours a day using laptops and phones than sleeping.

Augmented reality merges the real surroundings (including people) with virtual elements, bringing the real world and real humans back to the communication - in an advanced version. Think of video calls: for example, a face beautification technology developed at Banuba allows to read, analyze and visually smooth user's anthropometric data and mimics. So no more cancelling a video call due to a bad hair or makeup day.

Apple is experimenting with expression recognition in animoji. The computer's ability to "read a face" powers more personalized content. To detect muscle movements that correspond to emotions, we work on the Facial Action Coding System (FACS) to recognize anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, and surprise - and to transmit those emotions visually in communication.

For business meetings, we are working on an innovative privacy tech, separating user image from the background hiding everything happening beside the shoulders and replacing with a custom picture. This allows holding a conference or going through video-interview regardless geographical location.

CONTENT AND ENTERTAINMENT

Interactive e-publications will soon make way for advanced AR-based media. Weather reports, news, product details, or ads - augmented reality makes the information more accessible and contextual. In fact, AR changes the media storytelling by providing a more immersive platform for deeper content consumption.

AR already changes the landscape of the social media. Snapchat became a success, just as today is Facebook's AR initiatives. Phones are only the start: goggles, visors, contact lenses, monitors, car windshields and other new hardware development is triggered by AR.

In entertainment industry, AR technologies like Banuba's facial motion capture scan the person's face movement and convert them to computer animation for movies, games, or real-time avatars. Derived from the real people's movements, the technology results in more realistic computer animation than if it was created manually.

GAMING

Niantic, a company behind Pokemon Go, did great in bringing AR gaming to mass market. Being a small niche of mobile gaming in early 2010s, now AR gaming market is expected to grow by over 152% yearly by 2023. Augmented reality tech takes gaming to a new level - a user is not just focusing on a virtual gaming worlds, but perceives the game in reality.

In addition to triggering investment and hardware development on AR market, Pokemon Go paved the way to other AR gaming apps and developers. Together with Inventain, a young European gaming company using the cutting-edge technologies, Banuba also targets the AR gaming market with Camera First startup, furthermore developing the AR-avatar based app creating personalized 3D-emojis and stickers. The avatar is to replace a unified login for all company products making the core of the whole AR-software ecosystem. Another AR app developed by Camera First is an AR-game based on video call.l

Still it is just the beginning: Camera First aims at much more than just a number of applications. Using technology for equity conception Banuba will provide its technologies, marketing and investments to its partners asking for competences and team members in return. According to Vadim Nekhai, Banuba would like to establish for up to not more than 10 partnerships

EDUCATION

Imagine kids in a biology class able to see what they had learned about on an almost real plant visualization. Or to immerse themselves in the historical reality of any bygone era. Or to turn a boring geometry class into live 3D models right on their desks. In a world of visual objects, it's arguably easier to learn visually rather than abstractly - and AR helps to merge the new knowledge and the reality.

ENHANCED PERCEPTION

The fear of public speaking can slow down a person's career. AR device will recognize facial patterns in the audience and recreate their semantics, mimics and anthropometrics so that the performer could check the audience's reaction in real time and make amendments to the performance. An engineer of today requires spatial reasoning skills and the ability to carry out complex calculations to get the information about the infrastructure's elements. To do the same, an engineer of the future will be able to put on a pair of AR goggles.

Finally, AR will enable everyone to overcome cognitive restrictions and use the power of human and artificial intelligence combined. AR and artificial intelligence will form so-called augmented intelligence of the human. It will be the new stage of our evolution, and not only the nature but technologies too will become the part of this evolution. And now we are just at the beginning of this new era of augmented intelligence.