The coolest augmented reality I have played with is an app called Star Walk. This app is way cool. It uses your phone’s location, and accelerometer to show you where important stars and constellations are in the sky. If you use the app during the day, it will show you where all the stars are hiding that you cannot see. It is even better at night, when you can see stars. Just move your camera around the night sky and you will see all the constellations that you know of, and even more that you have never even heard of!

The app is fun to play with, but in the end of the day it is a tad gimmicky, and doesn’t unleash the true potential of AR. When I think of a valuable use case for AR, I think of education.

Imagine yourself sitting in biology class, learning about the anatomy of an ostrich. The only ways to learn about their inner workings are either by your teacher drawing on the board/showing you pictures, or by getting your hands dirty. Wouldn’t it be cool if instead of these methods, your teacher brought a live ostrich into class, handed out some special glasses, and gave you a 360 tour of the beasts internals in the form of augmented reality? As you look at the bird, it would overlay the organs, veins, and even show you how the fluids flow inside the animal. You could apply a similar method to physics – the glasses could track how an object is moving, draw tracking lines, and calculate properties such as velocity and acceleration. It can also be used to enhance the arts – as your teacher is talking about something, you could be fed facts and data about it!

It could give an entirely different way of lecturing, that could enhance the learning process. There is no end to what people could do with AR as technology gets more powerful and compact. There are already some great examples of it, whether Google Glass, the Oculus Rift, or…???