In all the hubbub about celebrities dying the last few weeks, I somehow missed that Pachube started a blog about their work.
Okay. I really wasn’t distracted by the celebrities, but we do have a new source for AR information on Pachube’s blog.
Mostly, we’ve been discussing the software side of Augmented Reality. Most of the applications we’ve seen of AR have been in the realm of marketing with the occasional browser like Layar or Nokia’s “Point and Find.” But all these types of AR require human interaction to input the data for it to be visible. Pachube aims to be the connection of the real world to Internet through sensors to help create the Internet of Things.
They recently released a video on their blog showing how real time data can be shown on AR displays.
Though I would have to convince our draconian IS department at Toyota to allow us the newer smartphones instead of our Blackberrys to make this work, I’d would find a lot of use for in the plant. Often we’re forced to use expensive monitors on our casting machines to display data. And if you want to change that data to a different format, forget it, because its extremely hard to change. Using Pachube style interfaces with a smartphone, it’d be simple to walk by a machine or production line, point my camera at it (preferably using GPS+compass rather than markers) and get stats instantly.
I also see Pachube type sensors allowing for lots of other interesting applications. I had talked about some of them a few months back in a few posts called Machines That Know, Good Things and Bad Things. Now I was mostly talking about using cameras with advanced object recognition, but sensors can work in similar applications.
Overall, happy to see Pachube starting a blog and I’m looking forward to regular updates on their endevours.
