For every piece of smart tech you add to your home, car, or office, you naturally have to add another smartphone or tablet app to your repertoire in order to use them. MIT researchers have created an augmented reality app that let’s you control all of your smart devices in one spot. It’s called Reality Editor. The augmented reality app shows the unseen wires of the digital world and makes it easy to draw new connections that create new functionality. The Reality Editor smartphone app allows the users users to link and control all your smart objects together. For example, your car windows can be raised and lowered at the touch of a button, or the lights in your house can be activated and deactivated by the proximity of your smartphone. “Imagine a future where everything around you can be controlled,” said Valentin Heun, a PhD student of Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)’s Fluid Interfaces Lab, who developed the app. The smartphone app uses fingerprint-like codes that can recognize smart objects when viewed within the app, Fastcodesign.com reported. It then calls up a literal HTML webpage, representing that object’s corresponding functionality, and overlays it on the gadget so that users can programme it. “To put a lot of functionality on physical objects can look very ugly and cost a lot of money,” Heun says. Using Reality Editor to reassign functionality from one object to another could not only declutter a physical interface, but it could also in the end free us from the restraints of our smartphones, instead making us depend on the physical world to manipulate our devices. Reality Editor is the result of three years of research, and yes, it really works. Currently, it uses QR-like codes to identify smart gadgets, which won’t be a requirement in the future, as the app will be able to identify the objects when they are viewed with the app. While there aren’t any devices that support Reality Editor’s open-source Open Hybrid platform just yet, but Heun thinks that will change as people look to do more than just put their homes in automatic mode controlled by a bunch of gadgets. To get a better idea of what Reality Editor can do, check out the video below.
