Augmented Reality Driving App Puts Kids Behind the Wheel

Kids are so cute when they mimic their parents' actions: brushing their hair, talking on the phone. Now, they also can mimic their driving skills.

Happi Papi, a company behind that creates children’s learning apps, has just released a completely new type of app for the iPad, with iPhone support to follow shortly.

Happi Full Throttle is an augmented reality driving experience for kids (or your inner child...). With the help of the iPad’s camera and a dashboard full of buttons, levers and a steering wheel, Happi Full Throttle aims to make any child feel like a real Fireman, Race car driver, Pilot or Submarine captain.

This app has many advantages says Patrick Larson, co-founder of Happi Papi. “First of all it is a great open ended digital toy that children can both play with in a variety of settings such as your living room, back seat of the family car or why not in the back yard. If parents take the time to talk with their kids about all the different functions each vehicle has, it becomes a great learning tool as well.”

Currently, the app has the following vehicles and features included:

• Fire Truck: ignition, side turns, wipers, horn, fire extinguisher, steering wheel (turns automatically when moving the iPad), and flashing siren.
• Police Helicopter: ignition, acceleration, steering stick, flashing siren, intercom.
• Sports Car: ignition, stereo, horn, steering wheel, side turns and wipers.
• Submarine: periscope, bubble blower, sonar, dive siren, smoke blower and steering wheel.

What's next, augmented reality workday for kids?

Augmented Reality Glasses Starting to Take Off

Google isn’t the only company moving into the “smart glasses” space. In fact, several companies worldwide are nipping at its heels.

The Wall Street Journal reported that warehouse employees at one company use head-mounted devices to help them navigate the staggering amount of merchandise in their 22,000-square-foot facility. Digital information is displayed over each worker’s eye, giving them visual directions through a Wi-Fi connection and helping them to navigate through the 1.4 million items shelved there.

The technology even confirms that the employee picked the right product, cutting down on errors by 60 percent—not to mention the fact that it frees up their hands.

The augmented reality device is made by Knapp AG, an Austrian firm, and costs $13,000. Meanwhile, Google plans to launch its Google Glass device next year, as smaller companies like Lumus Ltd., Vuzix Corp., Laster TechnologiesSAS and Recon Instruments Inc. work on their own prototypes that will do anything from “transmit turn-by-turn directions so people won't have to look away from the road while driving, to displays built into ski helmets that show skiers how fast they are cutting through the snow,” the WSJ reports:

Some computer scientists increasingly envision a world in which people wear glasses-like devices with a built-in camera and use apps that can recognize objects and faces—using technology called "computer vision"—and automatically retrieve information about those objects from the Web or other sources.

For example, an American visiting another country could wear such a device and run a translation app to overlay English on foreign-language billboards, street signs and store fronts.

"By 2020, the world will have perfect augmented vision," said Dave Lorenzini, who designs augmented-reality apps and related businesses at consulting firm Augmented Reality Co. "It's like creating the Internet again but inside the real world."

Can Augmented Reality Help People Eat Less?

Apparently, even hunger is in the eye of the beholder.

New weight-loss glasses are bringing high-tech augmented reality to the diet wars. A Japanese research team has created the glasses to trick a dieter's brain into thinking food is bigger than it is. In theory, this will make him believe he's eating more than he is.

How do they work? The glasses have an image processing system that increases the apparent size of food and recognizes the eater’s hand to make it appear the same relative to the food. Pretty cool, right?

To test the glasses' effectiveness, the researchers conducted a study in which people ate cookies while wearing the glasses. On average, they ate 9.3 percent less than people not wearing the glasses, according to The Yomiuri Shimbun. And if the researchers enlarged the size of the cookies by 50 percent, the subjects ate 10 percent fewer.

Will augmented reality become the next big thing in dieting? Only time will tell: The research team's findings will be presented at the ACM SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, held in Austin next month.

Augmented Reality Forever Changes Design, Construction Industry

Augmented reality technology allows urban builders and planners to design buildings and neighborhoods like never before.

On their smartphone or tablet, augmented reality tools allows them to actually see how their building will look on the block, the views from a propsed balcony, rooftop or garden or an entire block for a proposed multi-building project, even before ground is broken. And it can even help interior decorates envision how rooms will look with their ideas. 

VTT has combined technology originally developed for video and mobile games with positioning software to create these tools to aid urban and construction planners and interior designers.

Virtual Easter-egg Hunting in Australia

Australians who have the EggRaider app can hunt for virtual eggs in and around Melbourne. The augmented-reality Easter egg hunt syncs up with Facebook to allow players to race their mates and rellies to collect as many virtual Easter eggs as possible.

The phone's GPS and compass navigate players to the eggs. As players get close to the egg, holding the phone's camera while in the Augmented Reality mode shows them a marker and a 3-D model of the egg. 

Happy hunting, Aussies!