Augmented Reality Blurs Lines between Virtual and Real Life
Imagine being on vacation in an unfamiliar city. You’re hungry and looking around for something to eat. The choices are overwhelming. How do you know which restaurants are good? You don’t want to waste your money or your hunger on something inferior, right?
Now imagine putting on your sunglasses and looking at a restaurant. Except now you don’t just see a restaurant. You see customer reviews overlaying the actual building. Suddenly your decision isn’t so difficult after all.
So where can you get these glasses? Well you can’t… yet. But you can download an app from somewhere like Yelp and use your cell phone camera in the same way. And it’s not even that new of a technology. It’s been around for quite a while.
One of the industries that stands to benefit most from this dream technology is the print advertising industry. Think about it. Thanks to the Internet, magazines and newspapers are hurting. But now a print ad can have AR-friendly symbols attached. The reader just points his phone at it and suddenly a whole new world of hidden goodies is revealed. Print becomes a hybrid.
Just think where this technology could take us. Virtual reality meets real life. Maybe The Matrix wasn’t that ridiculous after all…
Image Credit: UCL BARTLETT SCHOOL OF GRADUATE STUDIES
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