Italian Technology company Inglobe has been featured on Mashable this week with a new tablet app that turns you into an expert car mechanic. Just point your tablet’s camera at your car engine and the picture is overlaid with all sorts of useful information to make car servicing easier.
This isn’t a new concept, BMW has been looking at this technology since 2008 and other car manufacturers have also flirted with AR.
As a technology this is almost screaming out for becoming a Google Glass application. It’s interesting because it’s one of those use-cases that helps us start to see just how useful augmented reality could be when combined with the right hardware. Holding up a smart phone or pad is unwieldy but this type of app integrated with a pair of glasses becomes really interesting as it could continuously be feeding us useful information whilst we tinker. It will be interesting to see whether the car manufacturers partner google to deliver Glass apps to support their products.
Let your imagination range a little all sorts of interesting augmented reality applications come to mind. In a recent article I featured Google’s project to bring wireless communication to Sub-Saharan Africa; imagine that you’re a doctor performing a new procedure in a field hospital somewhere in the middle of Rwanda. A daunting prospect. Now imagine that you have medical information overlaid across your field of vision by Glass and better still a more experienced colleague is watching what you’re doing through Glass and feeding you advice and instruction.
The potential of Augmented Reality Service Applications is fascinating and is set to revolutionize the way we look at technical services in the future.
Camicus.com 