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February 13 2012
Lost in a Store? The Lightbulbs Can Beam You an Escape Route
HElloo0OO0! I will show you the way.
Imagine yourself in a department store. You’re lost—alone and stranded somewhere in hosiery. What will you do?! How will you ever find your way to the shoe department? Take a deep breath. Look around you. Are those LED light bulbs on the ceiling? Take out your smart phone, raise the camera so it can see the bulb, and pray that you’re right.
Yes! The LEDs are sending location information to your phone, which, via a newly developed indoor navigation app called ByteLight, provides you with detailed instructions: “Go the the end of the aisle. Turn left. Walk until you can see the escalators. Go up one floor. You are in footwear.” Weeping with relief, you accept ByteLight’s offer to give you detailed step-by-step directions to a pair of shoes that is on sale (in addition to providing navigational information to particular items or areas, it also beams you information about nearby deals).
Phew! Thank goodness for extremely accurate indoor navigation apps. We’d all be hopelessly wandering in cosmetics until the end of time without the life-saving information that can be beamed to our phones from the lightbulbs—not to mention we’d miss ...
July 05 2011
Augmented Reality: Koreans Grocery Shop While Waiting For the Subway
For those of us for whom multitasking is a high art, a South Korean retail experiment combining grocery shopping with commuting looks like a godsend.
In a bid to boost online sales, grocery retailer Tesco covered the walls of a Korean subway station with photos of its merchandise arranged on store shelves. Each item was endowed with a QR code, those black-and-white squares recognized by smartphones, and commuters on their way in to work could snap pictures of the codes with phones to fill a virtual shopping cart. They paid for their items via an app, and the food was delivered to their homes after they got home from work.
No after-work grocery shopping crush, no squeaky-wheeled carts, no post-apocalyptic check-out lines. Just a little less time devoted to playing Angry Birds on the platform.
In terms of technology, nothing here is new: QR codes have been around since the 90s and began to appear on ads soon after the advent of smartphones, and grocery shopping online with services like Peapod is old (fifteen-year-old) news. But this appears to be the first time the two have been combined.
It’s certainly a more constructive use for QR codes ...
August 09 2010
Terrible Bakers Rejoice: Here Come Augmented Reality Cookies
We’ve asked augmented reality to help us drive, overcome our phobias, and put names to faces. Now we want cookies. Researchers at the University of Tokyo in Japan have devised a headset that can replace the appearance and smell of a plain cookie with tastier varieties including chocolate, almond, orange, maple, lemon, and cheese.
The group, led by Takuji Narumi, presented its research at the SIGGRAPH conference on computer graphics at the end of last month. “Augmented gustation” is a challenge, the team says, because taste relies on so many of our other senses. We see the embedded chocolate chips. We smell the straight-out-of-the-oven scent.
The “meta cookie” project attempts to use our multiple cookie senses to create a virtual cookie variety pack. Users choose their preferred cookie, and a camera on the headset overlays an image on a plain sugar cookie and sprays the correct associated scent, be it maple or cheese. The closer the cookie gets to the user’s mouth, the more of the scent the headset cranks out. Though the test subject in the video above appears satisfied, TechNewsDaily reports that the trick did not fool everyone. One cookie remained “mostly neutral” tasting though the headset tried to conjure maple and chocolate flavors.
Perhaps researchers will next attempt to copy the cookie’s feel? Texture seems to matter: ask anyone who’s entered the crunchy versus chewy fray.
Related content:
Discoblog: Psychology’s New Phobia-Fighting Tool: An Augmented Reality Cockroach
Discoblog: Your Augmented Reality Life: Coming Soon in 2020
Discoblog: Augmented Reality Tattoos Are Visible Only to a Special Camera
Discoblog: One Small Step Closer to Superhuman Cyborg Vision
Discoblog: Will the Laptops of the Future Be a Pair of Eye Glasses?
July 06 2010
Psychology’s New Phobia-Fighting Tool: An Augmented Reality Cockroach
Looking for a midnight snack, you open a Tupperware container. Inside you find not your dinner leftovers, but a nasty cockroach. You stick your hand in.
Welcome to augmented reality psychology. The cockroach in the Tupperware is only in your mind–or your virtual reality goggles–and is part of an exposure therapy technique meant to treat those with extreme phobias.
Though traditional exposure therapy might require a person afraid of elevators to ride one repeatedly, or demand that a person afraid of cockroaches meet one face to bug-eyed face, the mere prospect of such experiences is enough to drive some patients out of therapy.
But perhaps, as described in a small study in Behavior Therapy, an augmented reality cockroach can provide all of the benefits without the ick.
Technology Review blogger Christopher Mims describes the setup, in which virtual cockroaches are inserted into video images of the real world.
“Combined with a camera on the front of the headset, the system allows researchers to show wearers both the real world and realistic cockroaches. The paper reports that the roaches could skitter, wave their antenna, and even change size from small and medium to hideously large.”
In the study, six women underwent a three-hour exposure session with the faux roaches. The hand in the Tupperware scene was a final test, which the study participants passed. Follow up tests over the next year showed that they continued to stay strong against virtual creepy crawlers.
Commenters on the Tech Review blog are already calling for non therapeutic uses, i.e. video-gaming: Duck Hunt meet bug squash.
Related content:
Discoblog: Let Them Eat Dirt! It Contains Essential Worms
Discoblog: Small Comfort: Cockroaches, Too, Get Fat on an Unbalanced Diet
Discoblog: Your Augmented Reality Life: Coming Soon in 2020
Discoblog: Augmented Reality Tattoos Are Visible Only to a Special Camera
Image: flickr / Steve Snodgrass
April 29 2010
Need to Find the Big Dipper? There’s an App for That
Maybe Soup is currently being updated? I'll try again automatically in a few seconds...
