Augmented Reality with Scott Montgomerie

Augmented reality applications are slowly making their way into the world of the consumer. Pokemon Go created the magical experience of seeing Pokemon superimposed upon the real world. IKEA’s mobile app lets you see how a couch would fit into your living room, which has a significant improvement on the furniture buying process.

Augmented reality applications can have even more dramatic impact on industrial enterprises.

Have you ever set up a factory? You might need to build a conveyor belt. You might need to put together the parts of a giant machine that extrudes steel. You might need to fix a silicon wafer fabrication machine. It takes an expert to set up these heavy, complicated machines.

ScopeAR is a company that builds augmented reality tools. One of the ScopeAR products allows users to telepresence with each other to collaborate on the construction and maintenance of heavy machinery.

Imagine I am setting up my factory, and I have a complicated piece of machinery (let’s say a conveyor belt) in front of me. I have never constructed a conveyor belt before. I put on a HoloLens, and set up a VoIP call with an expert who has experience with that piece of machinery, and they point out what I need to do by superimposing 3-D arrows, text, and other instructions on my field of vision. They can share my experience and help guide me through the process.

This is such a flexible tool–you can imagine applications for augmented reality assistance being useful in medicine, construction, education and other fields.

Scott Montgomerie is the CEO of ScopeAR and in today’s episode, we talk about the state of AR, how the AR tools from Apple and Google compare, and how the similarity between tools used for mapping the world in AR relate to the tools used to map the world by autonomous cars.

Scott was a great guest, and I hope to have him back on in the future.

We have done some great shows about how to build augmented reality and virtual reality applications. To find these old episodes, you can download the Software Engineering Daily app for iOS and for Android. In other podcast players, you can only access the most recent 100 episodes. With these apps, we are building a new way to consume content about software engineering. They are open-sourced at github.com/softwareengineeringdaily. If you are looking for an open source project to get involved with, we would love to get your help.

Shout out to today’s featured contributor Edgar Pino. He is working on a real-time chat application for Software Engineering Daily, so that we can have chat rooms for people to discuss the episodes easily. Innovative work!

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