Augmented Reality – The possibilities are endless !

What is the future of search, some people might say it is fetching results faster, more relevant and as close to what you expect to find. But like me there are those who think otherwise. This is a look at the hottest new technology on around called augmented reality. Here is the Wikipedia for those who need a textbook definition of the technology.

For the past couple of years I have been following this awesome technology called augmented reality, what is it ? and how is it going to shape our next world is the question that I keep finding myself trying to find the answer for. It is strange, for something that was a concept this technology is now seriously changed the way we might be doing our work in the next few years. It is going to change the way we search for information !! A few years back when Google earth, Android OS and Google images was in its inception, Google announced that they wanted to make a technology that a person using a camera enabled phone would click a picture and Google would fetch information about the place or event. Well you don’t really need to “fetch” information anymore. Augmented reality, provides all the information you need when you see through the camera of the phone.

This was something that I was very interested to see in reality, since I had seen the first application the wikitude demo. When I visited the GE website, looking for information about their eco friendliness. I came across the world’s first large scale implementation of augmented reality. It blew my head off. I started to see the future that Google spoke about in the background. In fact you could start picturing the uses. A few months later, there are numerous tests being done worldwide for augmented reality based applications. There was this unbelievable futuristic vision pointed out by petit inventions that started people thinking in very open ways. Nokia has an application that runs on their phones that does some searching based on pictures called Nokia point and find. You can also see a demo on youtube here. Apart from the above few demo’s, there are now within a few months a lot of applications that people have worked on and come up with. There are applications ranging from Advertising, entertainment, gaming, medical training etc that are now in labs as being tested.

The Bionic Vision lens

The only hindrance of extreme wide spread use of this technology is the fact that it needs an external device for the technology to work well, including the camera, processing, and display. Now think of this technology being used in conjunction with another technology that is the Bionic vision. Check it out here. The possibilities by connecting these two technologies are endless. Let me know if you think of any others.

Infotainment = Information based Entertainment