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 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.

Augmented Reality in Education

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?