Name: Augment
Price: Free
Mission: ”Visualize 3-D Models in Augmented Reality”
Easily one of the most powerful smartphone apps we’ve seen to date, it may be considered a godsend for those trying to figure out how to furnish and organize their new place of residence for the summer or next academic year. The concept is elusive in its simplicity — drag and drop, except you can choose what intangible object to drag and where in the real world to drop it. It’s like a virtual reality, except instead of some fantasy world, it’s your own — and you can choose what to do with it.
It allows you to take any kind of furniture or home decor product for a test drive by simulating the appearance it would have in your home. Next to the “purchase” button on an online site, it includes another button that will copy its 3-D model into the app’s database. You can then point your device’s camera anywhere, and the technology will generate that 3-D model in the space that you’ve designated for it. For example, let’s say we found a couch that looks comfortable, but we’re not quite sure how well it’ll fit in with the beige color scheme or whether it’d fit in the small corner. We simply press the conveniently located button, and we can now see what the couch would look like in the living room — and, better yet, we can drag it around the frame to see where the best fit would be. It also works with posters and technology that you’re thinking of adding to your apartment; heck, you can even throw a simulated pool into the backyard area too!
It’s a great way to have everything you saw in the store without having to go through those rather irritating processes of purchase, transportation, movement and return. Now, you don’t have to depend on your friends from the crew team to lug around all that crap you bought without knowing whether your roommates would like it or not.
Even if you don’t actually need to use it for its intended purpose, it’s a pretty cool system to play around with. It also creates 3-D models out of the things you point it toward if the app recognizes the structure of what it’s looking at — so you can play God for a few minutes and create something out of nothing. Or, if you’re exceedingly bored, you can go to the closest department store and mess around with their setup, because they have plenty of movable objects to play with. For more advanced users who are familiar working with contour maps, you can generate the 3-D version of what you’ve drawn onto a 2-D surface, like a piece of paper. And for architecture majors, this is an invaluable tool in showing off all of your work.
Naturally, this works better on devices larger than phones — namely, iPads or Android-based tablets — for the sole purpose of being able to see everything on the bigger screen. Considering its well-developed nature and the fact that it’s free, we’re busting out a five-Clog rating for this one.
Image source: AugmenteDev
Contact Uday Mehta at [email protected], or follow him on Twitter at @mehtakid.