ANOTHER WORLD

POWERED BY STATE-OF-THE-ART HARDWARE AND SOFTWARE, AUGMENTED REALITY WILL CREATE A NEW, PARALLEL UNIVERSE OF VIRTUAL OBJECTS, CONVENIENCE AND EFFICIENCY IN THE COMING YEARS

- NIDHI SINGAL

JUST IMAGINE THIS. You land at the Denver International Airport in the US with barely 20 minutes to catch your connecting flight from a different terminal. So, you need to walk, take a train, and walk some more. Today, you have one option—run—with no idea if you will make it in time or end up missing your flight. But not in the augmented reality (AR) world of the future: as you step out of your aircraft, your smart lenses would scan the nearest gate number, search the airline database for the connecting flight’s gate number and, using the airport’s indoor maps, project directions on the lens itself and also display your estimated time of arrival basis your walking speed. If you have time, you could canter along. Glancing through the shops on the way would overlay the smart lenses with the in-store collections, which you could simply add to your cart and pay for with a voice command, and collect within minutes—all with the assistance of your smart lenses. Cool, right? This is a sample of what AR can power, not in the distant future, but barely within a decade from now. (And yeah, in case you’re wondering, if you’re really late, you still have to run!)

Pegged to be a promising technology over the past few years, AR uses technology to enhance reality with digital components. Think of it as a virtual layer added to the real world. And this layer, which is mostly visual with auditory or haptic, creates a composite view that can be used to convey additional information and create an immersive experience for the end user. It is, essentially, a real-time augmentation of the physical world.