A lot of people and media outlets talk about virtual reality, a new technology that will grant us access to unseen worlds, improve our online interactions, give a third dimension to minimum deposit casino games, and revolutionize the world of entertainment as we know it. While VR is a lot of fun, it’s mostly impractical, too – it obstructs our vision from the real world, putting us inside a virtual one instead. There’s another technology, though, that slowly makes its way into our everyday lives, that places a digital layer of information on the real world, enhancing it instead of replacing it with a virtual one. Augmented reality is already crawling into our lives in one form or another, and what it offers is often more exciting and useful that VR would ever be.
Home decoration
What would it be like to be able to place the furniture you intend to buy into its place without having to buy it and to haul it home? This might be the future of interior decoration – and it’s already here. Augment, a B2B supplier of augmented reality services, is offering its customers a new way to deploy product catalogs. Customers will be able to choose their preferred products from the online catalogs and place them (virtually, of course) into their own homes, seeing the result on their phone or tablet screens. This way they will be able not only to imagine but see how they will fit – and how they will look like – before actually purchasing them.
Swedish furniture manufacturer IKEA has a catalog you can already use this way, and we can expect more similar products to be released in the near future.
A digital layer
Placing a digital layer on top of the real world, providing you with information of your preferred type, gets revived with augmented reality. Today, even simple things – like Lampix – can transform any of your surfaces into a device capable of things similar to Microsoft’s “Surface” table but for a significantly lower price.
Basically, Lampix is a table lamp that can turn any surface into a touchscreen. It is equipped with cameras, a projector, and – of course – a computer to control them. As its name suggests, it also doubles as a desk lamp.
A digital HUD for bikers
There are already smart glasses for cycling available but none of them so slim and easy as Everysight’s upcoming Raptor. The product – that will probably be released this year, although Everysight hasn’t specified a date yet – will project all kinds of information on its see-through display that doubles as the glasses’ lenses, always in the line of sight. It will be able to display navigation information, speed, heart rate, and other information, and will even be capable of recording your ride in HD (with sound).
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