AR – augmented reality – is an interactive experience of a real-world environment whereby the objects that reside in the real-world are “augmented” by computer-generated perceptual information, sometimes across multiple sensory modalities, including visual, auditory, haptic, somatosensory, and olfactory. This is according to Wikipedia. Now for how it can be used.
There are any number of uses for it, but lets take a look at one here. A retail cosmetics store called Lush Lens is using it now for packaging free products. They do this by creating solid forms of shampoos and other cosmetics that have no packaging. They have an app that provides all the info you need for each product. The customer comes into the store and uses the camera provided to point at the product they want and the app will tell them all about the product. Neat, huh? So far, Lush Lens is only in Milan, but they’re working on going global.
This is just one way AR is being used. Other companies are looking into it because plastics are becoming a real source of problems for our wildlife. Discarded containers are making their way into our oceans, causing a huge amount of troubles for the marine life there. Turtles, for instance, love to eat jellyfish. But they can’t distinguish them from some types of plastic waste that ends up floating on our oceans and so will swallow that instead. These products can’t go through the turtles’ digestive processes and so cause considerable difficulties. Often death. We need to be kinder to our wild friends. So companies are now starting to look into this problem.
There are other ways this problem is being looked into at present. I’ll write about them in the next installment of our AR articles next week.
Robot Aficionado 