I was drinking a beer and noticed an ad on the beer coaster for La Chouffe beer. It showed a gnome holding a beer and mentioned an app, free, from the app store.
So I downloaded the app and followed the instructions and the little gnome dude appeared to come to life. He drank his beer, ran around, got a refill all on my iPad screen.
Drinkers around me were amazed, acting like it was sorcery.
Is this “state of the art”? How does it work?
It’s “augmented reality”. I guess you saw something like this: La Chouffe Gnome. It’s a simple version of those funky Project Glass glasses; basically, when you run the app, it takes control of the camera, detects the boundaries of a particular object (the coaster), and replaces what appears within that boundary on the screen with its own graphics. With something fancier like Project Glass, the software detects a wider variety of objects and reacts in many different ways.
That’s it! Very cool.