The View From Above: In Hard Focus Round-up (August 1, 2011)
Monday, August 1, 2011 at 5:15PM
Augmented Reality Can Fix Your Flat: Who needs a mechanic or car salesman when you have a nifty iPhone app? Wired shared two videos today of car companies that are leveraging Augmented Reality to draw in potential customers and keep car owners on the road after flat tires or engine problems. A great substitute for car manuals, which are notorious difficult to read.
Video Projection on Your Phone: Geek.com reports that Alps Electric is working on a technology that will enable future smartphones to project high quality movies and pictures beyond the display screens. The lens that’s making this possible will be small enough to fit easily within smartphones and will project images without overheating or killing the battery thanks to a high light transmission efficiency.
Facebook profile as your new credit card and ID? Facial recognition has been cropping up recently in law enforcement and security, but TechCrunch brings up an interesting point concerning its future usefulness beyond safety: commerce. While online profiles are learning your real interests and starting to become legitimate sources for identities among those in your network, there’s a continuing reliance upon “transaction mazes” in the form of tedious online to offline commerce processes (think about researching, purchasing and using an airline ticket). Not sure if I’d want to share my Facebook posts with the local Best Buy, but it’s certainly interesting to think about the future of online identity and its benefits to both customers and businesses.
