What if, in the not too distant future, you had the ability to to make your shower instantly turn on to your preferred water temperature when you turned off your morning alarm? Or you were able to synchronize turning off your living room light with switching off your TV? A new augmented reality app developed by MIT can help you do just that.
Aptly named the Reality Editor, MIT's app makes smart appliances in your home instantly programmable, connecting them to essentially complete a precomputed action when one of the smart appliances in question activates, deactivates, or executes a command — prompting whatever it's connected to do the same.
The app, which took three years of research in MIT's Fluid Interfaces Lab to create, works like this: an interface shows the user the room they are standing in and all of their appliances or electronic equipment that they are able to synchronize as represented by a large, labeled black spot. Users can then link up these programmable items by dragging their thumb from one piece of equipment to the other, tracing a physical line. Ergo, this is how an app user could feasibly turn on their home entertainment system by simply turning on a light in their den; essentially, it "allows you to merge two separate realities into one truly interwoven experience."
"Imagine a future where everything around you can be controlled," as MIT's app designer Valentine Heun proposed in an official statement released by the university. "It goes to the deep origin of humanity: we're tool makers. We build empowering tools, to manipulate the world around us."
As per the press release, the app can be used to connect smart objects as simplistic as a child's toy to something as complex as factory machinery. Available through the App Store, each visual interface is modeled on html5, which means it can harness the Internet for myriad capabilities. Interested developers can use the free associated developer platform, Open Hybrid.
Check out MIT's AR app in action in the video clip below.
Via: Fast Company
