What is Augmented Reality
Holograms are not just hype. They are the future of computing. In Hollywood movies you might have seen some real world things blended with digital things. Well in films this is all done with movie magic but in the real world we really have that thing, and it’s called “Augmented Reality” or AR.
One of its coolest implementations is in car technology. Auto manufacturers have been experimenting with AR for few years developing a kind of heads up display for the drivers, so you can get information on your wind shield, like changing road conditions or how fast your car is going or other data. Meanwhile there is a little company, you may have heard of it, it’s called Microsoft. They unveiled a product called the “HoloLens”.
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The HoloLens is an AR head set. It has transparent lenses so you can see the environment around you but it can also project images on those lenses creating the illusion of free standing 3D holograms in your physical space. And you can anchor that hologram to any point within your environment and then walk around it as if it’s a real object getting a full 360 degree view of it. So this could be used for anything from turning a flat surface into a television screen to seeing what a new table would look like in your living room without committing to the buying part first.
Let's say you do commit and you buy that table and then you discover that some assembly is required, well a product like the HoloLens with the right app could help you to put it together. You can get step by step instruction and as you look it all of the pieces you displayed in front of you, so you can pick which one to start with. So you pick those up and then it tells you what to do with those pieces, making the whole process smooth and painless. This is just the tip of iceburg for the potential of HoloLens and it’s not the only augmented reality head set coming out, there is another company called Magic Leap, they got a big boost from Google and they are developing their own AR head set that uses digital light feel technology which is awesome.
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And what this means is we have all these different companies trying to use different implementation of AR and whichever one works the best that will become our defining experience.
Look into the Future
All of this is happening right now but let’s look into the futureand think about AR Contact Lenses. Lenses that have tiny LED lights in them and they are transparent that you wear on your eyes and you get the full AR experience without having to wear a head set that creates socially awkward experience.
I speak from experience there are actual companies and research facilities working on this right now like a Lab at university of Washington, so this could become a real thing in just a couple of years and beyond that who knows.
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Just imagine a world where if you want to know something about a person or a place you just look and the information comes to you, now the question comes to privacy and security and there are important questions we should answer right now because I believe Augmented Reality is the future of computing. Post your comment under this post about what you think about this.
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