Augmented Reality Today

Augmented Reality, although a relitively new technology, has already had some commercial applications.

The Pokedex 3D is an example of the technology today. The user places a card in front of the Nindtendo 3DS' camera, and uses the console to view the Pokemon which appears on the screen, thanks to the Pokedex 3D software. Nintendo have used this technology quite a lot in their 3DS, and it is a popular selling point of the console.

The video below displays a quirky application of AR. A company has had some AR business cards made up, and you can see how they interact in the video. 

As you can see, at the moment AR is mostly for entertainment purposes.

However, the supermarket chain Tesco have released an augmented reality web application which is designed to help customers with online shopping. At the moment there are only electronics such as televisions and media such as DVDs available to view. If Tesco were to expand this to include everyday groceries, this could be a very useful feature. You would be able to compare products by size as if they were in front of you. This would be very handy, as often online shopping can be even harder than shopping in real life as products often don't have decent descriptions or even images.

Unfortunatley the application crashes every time I try to use it so I can't post screenshots.

Augmented Reality and the Future

Augmented Reality is a technology which can be hard to explain. Imagine if a computer games graphics were projected into the real world. AR is, basically, this idea brought to life.

AR has a range of useful applications, as well as being something you can use purely for entertainment. Informative graphics and writing can be layered over the real world, and viewed with a smartphone or a pair of specially designed glasses. Audio can coincide with the graphics you see.

MIT Media Lab's SixthSense is an example of Augmented Reality technology. It incorporates a small projector, camera, smartphone, and mirror in a necklace style piece of equipment, as well as coloured caps which the user wears on their fingertips. By using the mirror and camera to view and examine the surrounding environment, transferring that data to the smartphone which processes it and obtains GPS coordinates, and then using the projector to project information onto the surface in front of the user, SixthSense can make a watch appear on your arm, a phone number pad appear on your hand, or something else entirely.

Using the fingercaps, the user can physically manipulate the projected infromation, like a mouse is used to interact with a web browser, or how a user interacts with a touch screen smartphone.

In day to day life, SixthSense could be a handy piece of technology. If you were to pick up a can of soup in a supermarket, SixthSense could find and project information such as nutritional value, allergy / suitability information, and reviews onto the can.

Although this isn't an example of AR as it is today, this "reverse AR" is a good example of how the technology could look in the future.