The scope of this thesis encompasses a detailed description of augmented reality
technologies, systems and applications as well as the future of augmented reality
technologies as the author sees it. This research makes use of the iOS platform as a
means to implement augmented reality and therefore the author believed it was important
to introduce the useful iOS tools and steps to creating an augmented reality by
introducing a designed and implemented non-augmented reality application and offering
the augmented reality transformation design solution. As a result, chapter 3 of this thesis
introduces iTranslatAR, a “picture translator” that uses Object Character Recognition
(OCR) to translate text present in images, through explanation of the methods relevant to
the transformation of iTranslatAR into an augmented reality application that is the use of
Tesseract OCR and its implementation as a foreign library in iOS platform. Then the
author offers a design for transforming iTranslatAR into an augmented reality
application, which corresponds to the application “translating” text from real time video
feed frames as opposed to pictures. In addition, section 4.3 presents an explanation to iOS
AV Foundation framework and its implementation necessary for using and extracting
video frames from the camera.