IBM’s augmented reality app sorts out food, everything else

Dan Seitz Contributing Writer, Tech

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Augmented reality is essentially “boot an app, point your phone’s camera at something, and it tells you stuff about it.” Usually it involves scanning some form of QR code. IBM, though, wants to make it absolutely seamless, and based entirely off of images fed through your camera.

IBM

The idea is to develop the app around shopping. For example, if you were in the grocery store, and you wanted to know the relative healthiness of two types of pasta sauce, pointing the camera at the label would tell you the nutritional information.

This is being designed as a medical app, at first, so that somebody with, say, diabetes can go to the store and not worry about any nasty surprises kicking them right in the pancreas. But the idea behind the app is to rapidly expand it and even allow it to recognize objects at an angle or at a distance.

Of course, it’s really only a matter of time before somebody hacks this thing to scan people and look for their Facebook and Twitter, so you should probably strip the web of your image now rather than wait.

AR App Will Help Shoppers [Wired]