Next Generation Tourism

Imagine you are traveling to Madrid for the first time and you want to get to know all the must-see places such as Parque El Retiro, Museo del Prado, Plaza Mayor and many others, or you just want to know a restaurant to for a nice dinner. If you don’t want to pay large amounts of money to a tourist guide, Augmented Reality (AR) is the perfect solution.

Once in El Museo del Prado, again, you have the option of paying a tourist guide, who will bombard you with information you will probably forget by the time you arrive back to the hotel, or you have the option of taking an interactive tour through the museum, which will enhance the experience in a way you never imagined. In fact, there is a company called Digital Binocular Station which is developing binocular stations within the museums that with the use of AR, when you look around the museum using the binoculars the objects, paints or statues come to ‘life’ in order to enhance the experience of museums or even historic places and landscapes. Watch the following video in order to get a better sense of this digital binocular stations.

AR will not only show you the places you need to visit, it will also take you there using GPS, give you insightful facts about that place, but more interestingly it could allow you to see that same sight in different time periods. Lets say you are in New York and the application takes you to Time Square, you could see how that same place looked 10, 20 or even 100 years ago. How interesting would be to go to Berlin and see how the Berlin Wall looked before it was demolished?

Below is a video that shows you an application that is already available, called Rio that allows you to get to know Rio de Janerio, Brazil in a very interactive and convenient way.

If you want to learn more the Digital Tourism Think Tank released an interesting report talking about the potential and many applications that AR has in the tourism industry.

From the business side, AR in tourism is also an excellent business opportunity for Hotels and Restaurants, since business can post special offers and events through the applications. For example you walk near a Hotel, you can watch virtually the rooms and even book a room. We believe that AR will revolutionize tourism in every aspect and we can expect that in the future people will be using more and more these applications when they travel.

The future soldier

We have now looked at how Augmented Reality will evolve and impact several different parts of society. But as of now, we have not really touch on the one of the main drivers of AR in society, the military. As a reader of this blog, you might be aware of that fighter jet pilots have already used AR functionality for a while already in their helmets.

 

The militaries around the world are now spending considerable amounts of money in developing a mix of new AR and Virtual Reality technology, as they see this as key ingredients in their future combat operations. With the AR glasses coming to the market, it will be of an obvious benefit for the normal soldier, as it can serve both as a communication device and for informational purposes. In the upcoming Q-Warrior, the soldier will have both access to map data, enemy locations, live stream from drones, night vision and general information from the command central. .

With the introduction of the Oculus Rift, and their backing by Facebook, you can probably imagine the soldier conducting training operations in a virtual world, with these glasses on. As an example, the Norwegian Army has started to incorporate these into the real world as well. With the Oculus Rift you can also display real world images with a digital overlay, just by having some cameras giving you the necessary information. Imagine the driver, the commander or the operator of a tank. Inside a tank you have limited eyesight, which also limits your handling abilities in war situations. So what they started to experiment with is to place multiple cameras on the outside of the tank, which are then displayed through the Oculus Rift display. So as the operator move his head around, he will get displayed the outside view according to the direction of your head. Teknisk Ukeblad (In Norwegian), also have a video displaying this in practice.

We see this just as the first step of usage of the likes of Oculus Rift in this context, later we believe you could easily add digital overlays to these images. So the driver would be able to see information about the vehicle, maps, the enemy etc. While the canon man, in addition be will able to see his enemy and aim and control his canon through the glasses, even through night vision. The possibilities are limitless, and we believe this is just one example on how AR will revolutionize the army. It could very well be a first step towards developing a real life Iron Man.

Photo: Eirik Helland Urke - www.tu.no

The future of sex and porn

Ever thought how it would be like to experience sex as the opposite gender? This is a question raised by the 12 year old movie Minority Report, when Tom Cruise's character goes to the hacker to extract a vision from the precog. The hacker mentions that one of his best-selling experiences is enjoying sex from the opposite gender. A first step of this can now be true if both of you are using the Google Glass, as a new app released called Glance lets you record your intimate activities and even allows to stream video from the other device so you see what you partner is seeing at the moment.

How did we get this far? After the initial device introduction to the intimate life of vibrators, dildos, beads and other sex toys, some even found their way into condoms, with vibrating rings and the sorts. A few pictures, cameras, recorders and the internet made a lot of them public and out for the world to see. The AR part of it started with the Kiss Phone, a phone with lips that could let you experience the kiss being sent by determining the temperature, pressure, speed and sucking force applied to one end and reproducing it on the other. Just like a phone, but sending a kiss instead of voice.

That looked really cool for couples suffering from long distance relationships or the sort, but now we are getting ready to include all other sort of devices to "improve" our carnal interactions, one of the most intimate human encounters. And it won't be far until we ask ourselves how far are we from using the helmet from Demolition Man? Acting as if sex was all about a rational encounter when it is all about the passion and attraction that no scientist can explain?

Lenina Huxley rationalizes her proposal by saying "After having observed your behavior this evening and my resulting condition, em, I was wondering if you would like to have sex". John Spartan's enthusiasm is waned when he is handed the helmet, and more surprised when he gets the helmet off and is questioned why "they broke contact", to which he puzzled responds "I haven´t event touched you yet". His next proposal about doing it the old-fashioned way is answered with a clear "Eeeeeewww, disgusting! You mean....fluid transfer???"

In this way, we believe that so much introduction into this private area is really pulling couples apart, and setting a lot of pre-booting for an encounter to occur. Do you imagine being with your partner after a night out, start making out in the elevator home and once you reach your living room you are unable to copulate because you forgot to charge your Google Glasses? Do we now have to start saying we got "battery-blocked?". Or if you picked up someone at a nightclub and later cannot consummate because you have Google Glass and she has Apple Glass which are not compatible?

As a bonus, we will talk a bit about the porn side of the issue and how it is evolving in parallel. Remember our Ikea shopping post from a couple of days ago? Now you can use the same technology on Playboy's Netherlands edition, and once you scroll over the images with your camera, the pictures turn to life and start performing for you. All you need is a smartphone and the Layar app to turn a static printed magazine into a live video feed with additional content.

Now, how can you improve video footage using AR? Let's talk about the old and boring porn tapes that everyone has seen but no one publicly admits to doing so. We all now about the cheesy fake dialogues, porr settings and the lack of connection between the actors and the movie with the consumers on the other side of the screen. This can change as AR is incorporated in the equation. How you ask? Imagine you can immerse yourself into your desired scenario and with your desired partners doing whatever your mind can only imagine. No need to see actors "interacting" with actress as their directors want, you can become part of the movie and "interact" with the actress/actor/both in the way you want, with as many partners as you desire, in the setting you choose. What would that be like? And how much would you pay for it? Some companies are already working on this, like Pink Visual. Here is their presentation from the AVN's Adult Entertainment Expo in Las Vegas 

As you see, intimate life and porn have to very clear and separate paths. One is using AR to start including devices that could put distance between a couple, while the other is cutting the distance by placing the consumer inside the content and making him a part of it. So we need to ask ourselves, is this really the way we want to evolve? Is this path right, or did we missed something along the way? We have talked about how AR could ruin your dating life, and now we could argue it will ruin your personal encounters.