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 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 here.

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.

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