Today one of China’s leading search engines Baidu, Inc. has announced the development of a new augmented reality (AR) platform called DuSee.
A collaboration between Baidu Research’s Institute of Deep Learning (IDL) and Baidu’s search products teams, DuSee will be integrated into Baidu’s platform apps which the company states has a user base of hundreds of millions of monthly active mobile users.
Revealed at the 2016 Baidu Smart Marketing Solutions Conference, Beijing, the project the culmination of a 3D vision research project which began nearly two years ago.
Andrew Ng, Chief Scientist of Baidu, said at the event: “DuSee is a natural extension of Baidu’s AI expertise. The platform uses sophisticated computer vision and deep learning to understand and then augment a scene. The path to better AR is through better AI.”
While IDL Director Yuanqing Lin commented: “Many smartphone AR apps today work by ‘pasting’ a cartoon on top of the camera image, regardless of that image’s contents. The next generation of AR apps will use AI to understand the 3D environment, and create virtual objects that have rich interactions with the user and the real world. We are excited about future directions such as integrating AR with speech recognition and natural language processing.”
Baidu, Inc. went down the route of developing advanced software that leverages existing smartphone hardware, rather than building the specialized headsets traditionally used in AR and virtual reality (VR).
“DuSee will enable our customers to deliver a delightful real-time AR experience to the millions of people who use Baidu’s mobile apps every day, thus quickly bringing AR to a huge population,” said Zeng Hua, Baidu’s Key Account Department Senior Director.
There’s been no mention of when DuSee will be commercially rolled out, or it’ll see a worldwide release, but as we learn more VRFocus will bring you the latest details.
