I sat with a friend in the car and we came up with some ideas for augmented reality as it can be implemented with camera equipped hand held devices. This is what we came up with in about 20 minutes…
Two of the ideas are not mentioned here as we are testing their patentability for possible implementation.
1) Point the camera to a person and the device will measure/asses its clothes size. Pointing to a rack of clothes will mark with color the ones that are likely to be in a good size.
2) Point the camera to a person and the device will indicate if the clothes match and give a mark. The analysis can include colors, patterns, size etc. You can point to your own reflection in the mirror or to people you know.
3) Plant identification. Point to a plant and the device will identify the plant and give specific details such as nutritional / medicinal value, toxicity and care instructions.
4) Point to a flooded road and the device will help calculate the depth of the water at the lowest point according to the predicted convergence of the road lines (might need some assisting). If you choose your car type it can tell you if you should attempt to cross or not.
5) If you stand in line or drive in a lane, the application can analyze which lane is moving faster and suggest you move to that lane or queue.
6) Hold the device above your head and turn it slowly to scan the surrounding crowd and identifying people you know based on your contact images or searching for a specific person. The device can beep when it found a face that is close enough to a face you are looking for or a face you might know.
7) Point the device to people talking far away and the device will zoom the image and attempt to read the lips of the people and read out the identified text or save it to a file.
8) For the hearing impaired a device will show on a room picture the areas that noise is coming from. The device will track sounds as you move in the room and calculate their estimated location and plot this along with a sound type representation such as loudness (hiss or scream), rhythm (phone ring or something fell down) etc.
9) Use product catalogs to choose and place 3D furniture objects inside your room and walk around them to see exactly how they would look like from each angle and how much space it would take.
10) Look at a supermarket isle through the device to get visual arrows to locations of items you bought in the past.
11) Capture an item in 3D in a shop and see how it would look like with your home as background instead of its current background.
12) Point at a plate with food to automatically attempt to identify the main food components and asses nutritional values and calories. Might use a recipe database to get more info about preparation and other ingredients not seen.
13) Point at someone and choose a haircut to get step by step instruction on how and where to cut with constant feedback.
14) Show visually on room image the hotspot strength according to location as you walk through the room. Will eliminate the wandering around and random pointing to get better signal.
15) Automatically locate an object in view in online product catalogs (furniture, clothes etc..).
16) Take a picture when you leave your room or desk and point to it when you are back to see if anything was moved, taken or added.
