Ever wondered what sofa could you put in your living room, what color? What size? L-shaped or not?
We know…it’s hard to find out on a catalogue....... and that’s where Augmented Reality and IKEA can now address your problem!
With their new application, IKEA has taken the next step by moving their show room to your home. Just take your iPhone or iPad scan a page of the catalogue and voila you can see your new couch in your living room!
Want's a new sofa?
How about a new shelve?
"Offering a way of using mobile technology to enable to test products means the technology has a practical purpose and really helps customers visualize the way their homes could look." said Peter Wright, country marketing manager of Ikea in the UK and Ireland.
Check out how it works in this really cool advertisement
Have you already tried it? Let us know in the comment below what do you think about this app!
A few years ago I read a book, Super Sad True Love Story, a dystopian love story about people obsessed with superficiality driven by their wearable technology. The wearables, called "apparats" in the book, allow everyone to see instantly how everyone rates everyone else's attractiveness, called a "fuckability" rating, in a bar or any other social environment. Everyone rates everyone, constantly. The book was published in 2010 and in the three years since I read it, I've seen many aspects of the book slowly come true.
Imagine my horror when I discovered a new app, Lulu, which allows women to rate men with a number evaluation and hashtags such as "#ObsessedWithHisMom and #GoneByMorning." Despite Lulu's claim that this is "unleashing the power of girl talk" and my position as a proud feminist, let me confirm that I find this app straight up creepy, not to mention cruel. No one should have to have to relive a history of dating missteps each time they meet someone new. Many men agreed that apps like Lulu aren't ethical, and in response Lulu has now required that men opt-in to the site.
How long will it be before technology like this is wearable and part of augmented reality? How long will it be before your Tinder "swipe yes's" are recorded and shared? Before your crowdsourced physical desirability is viewable in glasses or contact lenses? What effect could this have on our dating behavior?
In this video, one woman takes a comedic look at how Google glasses might affect men's dating behavior.
Pushing the bounds of wearable apps, we can envision more disturbing situations, as seen in the video "Sight" below:
How ethical is it for someone to research you on social networks before a date? For them to use an app to improve their dating "performance"? Are these technologies a boon for the socially awkward or a manipulation of your dating partner?
Personally, I'm a bit old-fashioned about this stuff. If I pay more attention to my phone than my dinner date, at the end all I've earned is a closer relationship with my device. I do my best to keep my phone in my bag, but wearables combined with augmented reality technology imply that our attention has the potential to be constantly divided. The idea of a guy using an app to take me home would certainly feel like a manipulation... if I found out. But what if I didn't? Would ignorance be bliss?
It's possible that companies that advocate for wearables and the associated apps will succeed in shifting public opinion to become comfortable with these technologies and potential privacy invasions that they present. Alternatively, some trends indicate that people are becoming less comfortable with their private information being public, even on current social media. For example, many reports indicate that teens are abandoning Facebook and flocking to Whatsapp and Snapchat precisely because these apps allow them to more strictly control the audience that sees their information.
My prediction is that we will become more comfortable with wearables at the same time as we seek to share personal information with only a smaller, tighter network of who we consider our real friends, not our "facebook friends."
So far we have discussed some of the applications of
Augmented Reality (AR), such as in medicine, in this post we will be discussing
AR in education. In the area of education AR has incredible potential, so
far there has been some advances, but there is a lot more that can be done in
order to increase significantly the value to the learning experience on every
level. There is no better way to learn than interacting with the
objects we are learning about. Imagine a second grade teacher reading a book to
their students, as she mentions some of the characters of the story they
come alive and kids can interact with them. This will bring storytelling to a
whole new level.
Now imagine a student trying to study the human body and
its parts reading and listening are essential for education, no question about
that, but education deepens when we include creation and interaction. It is not the same for students to read the content from a textbook than interacting with a body. There are
apps already in the market that do exactly this. For example, Anatomy 4D,
which you can download from your smartphone or tablet, allows you to print out images from the human body just as the ones we
see in regular textbooks. But the magic happens when you use the app and
overlay your device over the previously printed images, the student can then engage into an active learning experience getting to know the body parts in a
more interactive and fun way.
We could think of many other topics such math,
science, history and many others where augmented reality will revolutionize the
learning experience making it more digestible, interactive and certainly more
fun.
The following video is a perfect example of little girl
in third grade using her iPad to solve a math problem. The moment she overlays
the iPad over the paper where the problem is, she can watch an interactive
explanation helping her to figure out the solution.
Every day we continue to hear how school systems, all over
the world, should put more effort into fostering problem solving skills into
students from all ages. We think that AR could bring many solutions to this
global need. AR could be used along with
Project Based Learning, which is a method where students gain knowledge and
skills by working for an extended period of time to investigate and respond to
a complex question, problem, or challenge. AR is the perfect way for groups of
children to thrive in a project based learning environment. Each child can use
their Augmented Reality capable device to build or help solve problems.
Nowadays practically every teenager owns a smartphone,
teachers in schools and universities battle every day to prevent students from
using their smartphones/tablets during lectures. Wouldn't it be more beneficial
if teachers could leverage this fact to encourage students to use their
devices to learn on different topics through AR? We see a lot of opportunity in AR
in the future, we wouldn't be surprised to see textbooks replaced by this
technology or at least watching them working together in every classroom.
Books in the future will most likely be adapted to suit this technology. So we
must ask, is AR the future in Education?
