A New Year has begun, and the forecasters of trends for the year ahead are busy trying to outpredict each other. An interesting trend that I have now seen mentioned in a variety of sources is the rise of Augmented Reality (AR). I think it's interesting because we're now starting to see uses of AR that actually add value for users, and that takes it out of the techy novelty category and into the business end of technology.
We've recently released a live prototype that is an example of the latter; more on that later in this post. Let's look at some recently generated noise about AR:
- Tech Crunch began the year with a comparison between AR and Virtual Reality (VR), with AR winning hands down.
- We've covered some of the i-phone AR applications before, but Layar have a great page on their site of 5 great uses of AR. (My favourite example is pictured above - it allowed people to see during building contruction, what the finished thing will look like in situ, and to be able to walk around it.)
- Another interesting technology that has appeared is the sekai camera - basically you can look through the camera and see in the world around you, what tweets have been made from those points by others. Navgiating twitter by walking along the street - interesting! Tech Crunch (again) covered this well in their blog.
Our latest AR development is for NZ Post.
Pictured below, it allows those who post parcels regularly to hold an item up to their webcam and see what size packaging they need to post it. Hello trade me users - this is for you (amongst others).
There's a discretely published prototype
here, which is a trial version for testing. Our next step will be to go live with some added functionality, but meantime why not
have a go and publish your comments here, so we can see what you think - we'd love to know!
If you want to know when the real thing is published, I'll probably tweet it - so
follow me for news.
