Homework 4

The app Star Tracker lets you use your phone to look around you and show you planets, stars, galaxies and much more space things. Now lets picture a world where we are able to harness the power of this technology and implement it onto a pair of AR glasses. Towns flooded with light pollution would now be able to see the stars for the first time by just looking up to the sky. Teachers could show students more realistic versions of constellations instead of the ones found in textbooks. Cloudy nights would no longer be boring moonless nights, instead you would be able to watch shooting stars or maybe even a meteor shower with a loved one.

A weather app could be incorporated into this app. The app will let you look up to the sky and could show prediction of the weather to come just like the predictions shown on the weather channel. This could be used to warn about dangerous storms like hurricanes or maybe even twister in the midwest. Another useful application for the app could be flight patterns. Air ports could use these on the take off pad. They could visual what planes are leaving and how often planes take the same path. They could also use it to prevent crashes. The app could show a prediction in the sky where two airplanes would be heading and help prevent them crashing into each other.

Another interesting idea for an AR sky app is having it play a movie off of a moving sky. It would be like your own personal movie theater, but having with you no matter where you went. You could also have an app that plays historical air battles that took place during wars. It could show information on each of the pilots during the war like, how old they were, what war they fought in, if there alive today, etc. Companies could also have planes that fly by with banners that have specific patterns. These patterns would trigger an ad from the glasses and then would show in the sky. Imagine having a giant celebrity offering you a product from the sky. The company could take data on how long the ad was watched, if the user bought the item from the ad, or how effective the ad was.

These glasses could also be used for environmental issues as well. They could accurately predict the air pollution from companies and then show the trail the pollution follows. It could then show the impact it has on the atmosphere and show off the immediate damage and the damage that would come from continuous pollution. Hopefully environmentalist could use this data to show people the real harm that air pollution has. The app could show information on how much air pollution we had in this spot 50 years ago, it could also show comparisons in the sky like showing the pollution as the size of a football field and having it displayed on the sky.

There are many different applications for an AR app that uses the sky. These ideas range from commercial usage to government usage and everything in between. I think that when technology advances, there will be more people looking at the sky and pointing at it with excitement.