Monday, November 23, 2015

Can you see it too?


Are you thinking of getting new furniture for your apartment, but are not sure how they will all fit together? Or are you thinking of getting a new couch, but are worried how it will match the rest of your furniture?

The IKEA catalogue app using augmented reality will make it possible to show furniture from an IKEA catalogue as it will look like in your apartment. To do so you have to place the catalogue on the floor at the spot where you want your new couch to go. Then you point your smartphone towards the catalogue and your video camera will show the room as it is with the additional new couch in the spot where the catalogue lies. You can now see if the couch will fit and if it looks like you expected it to. (Zeit Online, 2014)


Augmented reality is changing the world as we know it. In augmented reality we see the real world with supplementary digital content in form of sound, video, graphics, or GPS data. In contrast, a virtual world, which we are already more familiar with, only shows us a fictive reality, replacing the real world with a simulation.

Another example for augmented reality besides letting furniture magically appear in your apartment is the way it can be used in automobiles. A projector in the dashboard can project information such as speed, on to the windscreen. The information can be projected on exactly the spot where it is needed so that the driver does not have to look away from the road anymore as often as he has to do now.
For example, indicators for a change of direction will be seen on the road or floating directly in front of the road we want to turn into. Augmented reality can also help drivers to stay within the lane, as the boarders are illuminated with red marks at night. (Zeit Online, 2014)

For a marketing purpose augmented reality will play a big role, as customers can interact with the world around them.
Amazon for example has brought out its first smartphone called Firephone which offers a function called Firefly that tries to identify objects which can be bought on Amazon. This way, when a customer takes a picture of friends in a nice garden, the smartphone might recognize the flower pots and ask the user if he directly wants to buy them for his own garden. Maybe the smartphone also recognizes a friend’s jumper in the online store and suggest it to the user in the right size. This way impulsive purchases are encouraged at a very high level. (Zeit Online, 2014)
Augmented reality will also change our shopping experience a lot, as customers for example can try on the clothes on a screen and flic through the product range much faster than when searching the whole store for a matching skirt or top like the lady in the video. (Youtube)

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