MIT’s Reality Editor App Lets You Reprogram the World With Augmented Reality
[Philip Lelyveld comment: this is a cool concept piece. Use an augmented reality app to mix and match the components of your appliances to create appliances with greater functionality. Its a virtual 'maker' app. It will, of course, require coming up with a whole appliance product line that accommodates the app.]
Heun is a researcher at the MIT Media Lab’s Fluid Interfaces Group where he’s building an app that he hopes will effectively turn the one-dimensional objects in our lives into a library of parts whose functionalities can be mixed and matched via an augmented reality interface.
A more concrete example: If you wanted your food processor to have a timer, all you’d have to do is look at the object through the Reality Editor interface and drag a line from the toaster’s timer knob to the food processor’s motor; the two would then automatically be connected over the Open Hybrid server.
Using Reality Editor to reassign functionality from one object to another could not only declutter a physical interface, it could also ultimately free us from the shackles of our smartphones, instead letting us rely on the physical world to manipulate our devices.
Interestingly, Heun’s app assumes that users want more control over the objects in their lives, which isn’t always the case. Smart objects are attractive if only because they cater to our laziness—we don’t think about them simply because we don’t want to. Reality Editor requires active participation—at least at first. And maybe that’s not such a bad thing.
See the full story here: http://www.wired.com/2015/12/mits-reality-editor-app-lets-you-reprogram-the-world-with-augmented-reality/