Source: Raymond Wong /Mashable
These days when people think about augmented reality, they think about Pokémon Go, Google Glass, or even Ikea’s app that lets you see what furniture would look like in your living room. When people think about augmented reality, they think visual augmentation. High-end speaker and headphone manufacturer Bose want to change that. Bose wants to start augmenting reality with sound as well as images.
To do this Bose is developing augmented reality sunglasses that will give the wearer audio cues about whatever it is they’re looking at. What is even more impressive is that the glasses don’t use cameras at all. Instead, Bose’s glasses use onboard sensors and precise GPS data to understand what the user is looking at so that they can then pass relevant information through the two directional speakers built into the stems of the glasses.
As well as the glasses, Bose is also investing $50 million into a fund that’ll promote the development of the AR platform itself. Already signed up to the platform are giants like Srava, TripAdvisor, TuneIn, and Yelp, but Bose also hopes hardware developers will a start looking at making their own accessories that will take advantage of the Bose AR system.
If this catches on, it could be huge!
