During my usual morning “Feedly” browsing, I stumbled across a fascinating article on CNET that i would recommend you peek your head into:

http://asia.cnet.com/ikea-catalogue-app-places-virtual-furniture-in-your-home-62222009.htm

The basic gist of the article is summarised in this one image:

Essentially, Ikea has added an augmented reality app stocked with its catalogue of products allowing users and ergo consumers the abililty to overlay items into their homes or offices to see how it would look – a very smart idea indeed!

There seems to be a market trend with augmented reality – whilst Google Glass may be the fore runner it certainly isnt the first. Years ago we had the “Yelp” app allowing users to click on the ‘monocle’ and view shops and restaurants information overlayed onto the building itself:

This obviously helps you find your way around in a new city, town etc much easier (Not like the bad old days of rocking up in a new place with a 2G phone, low battery and a print-out from Multimaps!).

Not just for consumers

Fear not enterprise bods, this is not just a consumer trend. Whilst i was working at Cisco looking after Field Engineering operations, we were looking at having our field engineers have an app on their phones, or even special glasses that overlayed information onto the device they were looking at – so we could say “Look at the X6509-Sup32e and check if port 0/2 is flashing” – and without the user needing a manual or a CCNP, they could use their glasses and it will show them exactly where to look – this drives down costs of employing highly trained FE’s, and also allows quicker resolution off issues.

BMW were the real pioneers here from what I read when we first looked at the idea in 2010.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P9KPJlA5yds

The video above shows how useful this idea can be in terms of engineering – not just specific automative fields. An engineer can don the glasses, tie them into the systems diagnostics (Cars are all computerised now in terms of diags, etc) and have the part in question flash red on his glasses – cant get much simpler than that!

Conclusion

Whilst google glass is getting a bit of a slating at the moment for being “invasive”, the concept can hold a lot of water in the private sector in terms of engineering on site, and i can definitely forsee this technology moving into hospitals for surgeons, construction for architects, etc. context is always king – and this technology provides it.