Augmented Reality Win

Augmented Reality (AR) is a phrase you’ve probably heard lately, and you’ll probably get tired of hearing over the next few months.

For the uninitiated, AR apps install to your mobile phone and layer content to views of your, erm, regular reality. Sounds weird, right? There have been several iPhone apps released over the past few months that might help color the picture for you.

Yelp’s latest iPhone app version has an Easter Egg view called the Monocle that according to Marshall Kirkpatrick over at RWW, “uses the phone’s GPS and compass to display markers for restaurants, bars and other nearby businesses on top of the camera’s view”.

Presselite produces two public transportation apps, Metro Paris Subway and London Bus, that both layer information about local businesses as the user walks through the streets.

AR is booming, as companies are quickly sprucing-up their apps to include AR, and AR-specific companies are emerging, like Layar, whose app adds a layer of geo-tagged content from the web to your regular reality.

For me AR is a non-starter, since it requires a 3GS iPhone, or an entirely new brand of phone. Neither option is viable or desirable. However, I’ve been watching the developments in AR with interest, waiting for a killer app, or at least one I would use.

Friday, a tweet from Jason Grigsby revealed that app, the IKEA, how-would-that-furniture-look-in-your-house app.The app, created to launch a new line of furniture in Germany, simply allows you to superimpose a scaled image of the furniture pieces over the camera view of your mobile phone, meaning you can visualize how new furniture would look in any room of your home.

Oh, and take a picture of the finished arrangement to preserve your buying lust on the way over to IKEA.

All it needs is in-app purchasing to complete the cycle of awesomeness.

This is a really smart app, one that I want to make sure my wife gets at some point. Let’s face it, if she’s going to buy new furniture, which she is at some point, at least I won’t have to move it around the house all day.

In the past, she’s used home design software to model how furniture would look, which saved me tons of sweat and cursing, but an AR app would be so much easier for both of us.

Buying furniture has always been problematic because you can’t visualize how it will look once inside your home.

Case in point, back in the late 90s, I worked on an ERP implementation for a dot com whose business model was to sell furniture online. Eventually, one of the reasons they failed was that people were hesitant to commit to a big-ticket item without even seeing it in reality, let alone in their own homes.

This is beauty of the IKEA app.

I wonder if car companies will jump on this gimmick to let you see how a new car will look in your driveway, or parked at your office. Not as useful, but it might be fun.

Anyway, this is the first really solid use case for an AR app that I’ve seen, at least solid enough for me to want the app.

Find the comments and share your thoughts about AR.