First coined in 1990 by Tom Caudell, a researcher at aircraft manufacturer Boeing, ‘augmented reality’ used to refer to a head-mounted digital display worn by aircraft technician to guide them in the assembly of electrical wires in aircrafts.

Today, the fundamental idea remains in the definition of AR, which according to Digital Trend is "the interaction of superimposed graphics, audio and other sense enhancements over a real-world environment that’s displayed in real-time".

(Image source: Fotolia)

By this definition, AR can refer to some technologies which have already existed for years. Take for instance sports telecasting where you see colored lines drawn against real-time gameplay of say, a soccer match. These lines may be used to indicate the offside boundaries in which the players must not cross or to show the movements of the ball or players. AR is not to be (commonly) confused with Virtual Reality (VR), where the primary goal is to replace the real world with a simulated one.

We often take such existing technology for granted because they are so prevalent and commonplace that we don’t associate them with what we normally assume as ‘high-tech’ AR.

Recommended Reading: 5 Top Augmented Reality Apps for Education

The Beginning of Futuristic AR

If you ever need proof that AR will be the next big thing, just take a look at the upcoming Google’s Project Glass, a highly-anticipated head-mounted display that aims to bring AR to the next level. The key draw of having AR integrated with eyewear is that users will be able to view information and interact with the computer and the internet much like how we do for smartphones today, except this is hands-free.

Get info, notifications, emails, weather, directions and reminders or send voice commands, take snapshots, dictate text, ask for directions and more, all from a pair of eyewear.

By making the technology that recognizes any real-world objects and images rather than just codes (QR anyone?), AR is making a seamless transition that is universally accessible.

Seamless AR – The Ultimate User Experience

The AR we see today mostly on our smartphone apps are pretty interesting but not yet seamlessly integrated. We still need to hold up the smartphone or tablet and switch on the camera view to see results. It just doesn’t gel well with the concept of augmented ‘reality’. It’s a display of the reality rather than the reality itself – still not immersive enough.

With Project Glass, comfortable eyewear is coupled with intuitive interactions e.g. voice commands, and direct presentation of information in front of our very eyes. Add in powerful and stable connectivity and user-friendly usage and AR will not just be about what we see; it will be the ultimate social media tool for interacting and sharing our experience with netizens.

Paving The Way for the Future – Existing AR Apps

AR technology is taking mobile devices by storm because of their mobility and increasing technical capabilities. They have the necessary hardware components such as the GPS receiver, camera, screen display, magnetometer (compass) and accelerometer (the thing that auto-rotates your screen) for developers to create AR-based apps.

(Image source: realityaugmentedblog)

The fierce competition between mobile giants like Apple, Samsung, Google and the rest are advancing the specs of the devices and paving the way for more advanced AR apps.

As a matter of fact, there are already some exciting AR developments for various purposes:

Retail Shopping

An alternative would be an AR app on your smartphone that offers you personalized shopping experience. IBM research is already developing a mobile AR app for your shopping needs. What you’ll need to do is to specify your criteria for your product.

Depending on the developer of the app, the criteria can range from best-selling and best-rated products to healthy, low-fat and low-sugar products. Then, as with most other AR apps, you simply pan your camera across a select category of products, say cereals, and voila! The screen display reveals the special cereals that you’d want to get.

Education

Fancy recognizing constellations in real-time when you look upon the night skies? Well, look no further with Google Sky Map, an AR app that allows you to identify stars and constellations wherever you are. All you need to do is to point your smartphone towards the sky and the display will map out the various constellations.

(Image source: blogs.city.ac.uk)

If the heavenly bodies are of no interest to you, consider another educational AR that seeks to ground students’ knowledge on earthly, geographic skills. GeoGoogle overlays geographical measurements like latitude and longitude on the surroundings in real-time to better appreciate their real-world applications.

Students are also able to use it for understanding navigational fundamentals such as direction (via compass) of their location, speed of movement of objects and distance to a specific destination. All these can be done with the camera in your mobile device.

Navigation

Location-based apps is one of the most common AR technology we currently have. All you need to do is point your smartphone or tablet to your surroundings and you’ll see the magic unfold on your screen display.

Using the device’s GPS receiver, magnetometer and the accelerometer, you will be able to find nearby restaurants, ATMS, hotels and other common places, all in real-time with AR apps like Wikitude.

(Image source: littlegreenrobot.co.uk)

Other similar navigational apps provide information on places or buildings when you point the camera at the location. You can also improve your general knowledge of the world with apps like NearestWiki.

Advertising

The advertising industry doesn’t spare AR technology as well. What most advertising companies do now is to utilize your mobile devices’ image recognition capabilities to produce the augmented experience. This leaves a positive and deep impression for viewers, and that’s what exactly advertising want to achieve.

Pointing your camera towards a specific object (e.g. a still poster) generates an animation or plays a video and turn what is otherwise a lifeless ad into an immersive one. Using the accelerometer, the animation or video follows the movement of your device no matter how you hold it. Check out the amazing ad campaigns for the Volkswagon Beetle and Starbucks.

Video Gaming

How about the gaming industry? There are loads of potential for AR to develop in this area. Google released a simple AR shooter for Android users known as DroidShooting. Holding your mobile device up and looking through its camera on your surroundings, you’ll see flying Androids targets in the actual environment of your location.

It probably looks pretty primitive to you for now, but take a minute to imagine where AR gaming can progress from here.

(Image source: thesocialjoystick)

As AR becomes as seamless as looking through a pair of eyewear, the experience will inevitable becomes even more immersive. Coupled that with 3D technology and improved graphics, AR gameplay is expected to wow all of us. Better yet, here’s an awesome demo of what it might appear to be like in the near future.

Integrating Info, Experience and Reality

Speedy Internet connections and improved mobile technology are bombarding us with information. We are checking our social networks, emails, news and sites from the moment we get up from bed. The next phase of this information age is to cater selective portions of information to each individual and make them a part of our lives.

Information, experience and reality will merge to become one as AR develops to its pinnacle and become the next revolution in information technology. Switching from one app to the next to get something done may need to be discarded and replaced with a unifying system for that seamless information flow. When that can influence our decision-making and interaction with the world at large, is when AR will truly alter the way we experience reality.

Think you are free from the chains of academia and can now roam freely to do what you want in real life? Or maybe get a job? For those who don’t have any experience with job interviews, they might ask the people around them, their family and friends, or even the Internet for tips or advice on how to ace a job interview.

(Image Source: Fotolia)

But like all kinds of advice not all of them is good advice. As time goes on, some of the ‘experience’ that well-meaning friends share with you are not even applicable to the current job-seeking atmosphere anymore. Here are top 10 misconceptions about job interviews that you might want to keep an eye out for.

Recommended Reading: 10 Most Asked Interview Questions: How To Tackle Them

1. Your Resume Must Be One Page Long Only

Your resume must only have one page because it was believed that interviewers won’t read your resume if it’s more than that. This is not true. It is quite dificult to summarize your whole list of achievements, contact info, objectives or relevant qualifications in a single page.

Reducing the font size or cramping too much of everything in, just to fit this one-page rule not only sounds ridiculous, it may also ruin the good impression the recruiter may have of you. You can expand this to two pages but it is best to keep the maximum length at that.

More related posts:

• 45 Creative Resumes to Seize Attention
• 7 Great Ways To Get Your Resume Noticed

2. No Call? No Job

So you have submitted your application and have waited days for the interviewer to call you but… no luck. Does that mean that you should move on since "someone else must have gotten the job"? Well, not quite.

Recruiters are a busy lot and usually only begin calling the selected candidates after the closing date of the job notice or a couple of weeks after your submission.

If you don’t get a call after applying, you can always send an enquiry email or give them a call to ask if they have hired someone for the spot, and you would probably find that they are still in the midst of processing the applications.

3. They Called, I’m Still In The Running

So you got the call, congratulations! Not trying to be a wet blanket here but sometimes you are called to interview for jobs that don’t even exist. Often enough companies invite applicants for interviews for the purpose of company studies or research to minimize expenses on recruitment research.

Instead of asking questions about you, they might ask questions how the working environment in your current or last work place, how much is your salary scale, what benefits you are enjoying etc. Even if you are caught in one of these ‘traps’, keep your chin up, you don’t know what it can lead too.

4. The Interviewer Is Well-Prepared

While being well-prepared is good for an interview, this rule will probably only apply to the candidates. Most interviewers have other more pressing matters to deal with and will only take a little of their time to prepare for your first meet up with them. Don’t expect them to have read your resume through and through. If they did, there wouldn’t have been a need for you to tell them "about yourself" at the start of the interview.

Take the opportunity to pitch yourself or your skills and make "you" stand out of the crowd. Highlight your strengths and other discerning factors and be prepared to be asked questions that clearly show that they have never even looked at your application.

5. Interviewers Will Ask All The Same Questions

Although you know what to say when they ask you about your strengths and weaknesses, the skills you can bring to the company and how you can help improve the company brand, sometimes they will throw you a curve ball and ask you a really strange question.

Trick questions like "How many balloons fit inside of San Francisco?" are popular with larger companies where the competition is really high. These questions can help them tell apart those who are creative from those who are book smart. How will you approach a seemingly overwhelming question like that? How will you react? That’s what they are looking for. Either that or they just like to see sweat through the rest of the interview.

6. Looks Don’t Matter, Heart Does

Fairy tales may end with the lesson that no matter how you look on the outside, it’s the inside that counts. But when it comes to reality, the human instinct is to stick to the winner, or anyone who looks like one.

Recruiters want candidates who look fresh, confident, energetic and enthusiastic. You don’t have to be Prince Charming but proper personal grooming and how you present yourself will definitely influence how much recruiters want you to join them. While we’re on the subject…

7. The Most Qualified Person Gets The Job

While being qualified gives the applicants a headstart, the job interview is more like a date. You might not be the most qualified but if there’s chemistry between you and the interviewer you most likely still stand a chance to be the winning candidate for the job.

Also, academic qualifications may have gotten you through the door, but that’s not the only thing interviewers are looking at. They need you to convince them that you are the man (or woman) for the job, that you can be a great addition to the company instead of just being dead weight.

8. Accept When Offered a Beverage

Interviewers may try to be accommodating and ask you if you would like tea, coffee or any other beverage. While the polite thing to do is to accept the offer, unless the mentioned drink is right in front of your eyes, decline it.

You may be making the interviewer go out of their way to get you a drink, when all they are there to do is decide just how good you are as a new addition to the family. And imagine if you’re in a lengthy interview, you sure won’t want your bladder to be full halfway through it. You’re already nervous enough as it is.

9. List Out All Your References

In some places, checking up with the references is only a practice used by human resources to confirm that you have previously worked where you said you did. Most of the time these references may never be contacted at all. However you can use this to your strategy. After the interview you would have gotten a sense of what the recruiters think of you or seek from you.

There is still time to pick the reference who can give you a leg up in the right sense, provided that you have contacted them beforehand and explained your situation to them.

10. Keep Your Answers Short

How would you feel if you ask someone a lengthy question, expecting a similarly lengthy answer only to get, "Yes, I think so" and "No, I don’t think that." as your answers? It’s okay to open up and talk about the company or to explain yourself when you are asked a question, particularly if you have done your homework.

If keeping your answers short will not help you get the job, why would you do it just because someone tells you to?

With everything computerized these days, we spend a lot of time typing away on our keyboard. If your job requires you to work on the computer, there are chances where you will need to use the same phrase, snippets, particular brand name in your work, over and over, and over again.

Wouldn’t it be great if there’s a tool that could help to speed up the typing process?

PhraseExpress is text replacement tool where when you type a certain keyword, the tool will auto detect and complete your sentences. You can add and customize the snippets you want to expand into the full phrase. Here’s how.

Recommended Reading: Tips And Tricks For Writing Fast (And Professionally!)

Getting Started

Let’s begin by downloading and installing PhraseExpress into your system.

When you launch PhraseExpress it usually won’t open up in a window. The application will be at the system tray icon. Double click it to open it up.

On the phrase and folder page, you’ll notice that there’s a lot of options to choose from.

To add a new phrase for PhraseExpress to recognize, click ‘New phrase’ or ‘New folder’ and enter in the needed details.

You can also set each of the folders in PhraseExpress to only execute on certain programs by ticking on ‘Execute only in specific program’.

A window will pop up where you can then choose the programs you want to restrict the changes to.

And on the settings page, you can set hotkeys for specific task for example, to add a new phrase, to open settings windows and much more.

When PhraseExpress is running in your system, it will auto detect what your are typing and will correct your mistakes as you go.

You can use abbreviations to make typing easier for example, instead of typing ‘Thank you for your feedback’ you just need to type in ‘tyfyf’ and it will prompt you to replace it with the full sentence with the press of a button.

We find PhraseExpress especially useful during coding. Instead of having to store snippets in Adobe Dreamweaver, all you need to do is to add the code on PhraseExpress. For example, when I type ‘hkdc’ and press the spacebar, it will automatically insert the coding.

This will be great for those who work a lot with html and have templates for their codes. Here we see an example of an image template code. This provides consistency and a more organized structure in the writing.

You can integrate PhraseExpress with software or applications that you use frequently for typing purposes as it could save your time.

Be it a desktop computer or a laptop, the majority of us has this problem – cable management. And usually, bad cable management leads to shorter lifespans of cables. But here is some good news for MacBook users.

ZenBoxx a company from San Francisco came out with ZenDock, a docking solution to free you from messy cables and a cluttered table.

The ZenDock connects to the MacBook’s Thunderbolt, Gigabit Ehternet, USB, FireWire ports and the power adapter, making it an all-in-one port. The body of ZenDock is made out of high quality aluminium and it has a look that matches your iDevice.

Recommended Reading: Taming Gadget Cables: 30 Holders & Organizers You Can Buy

There are two versions of ZenDock. One of it is ZenDock Retina which is for MacBook Retina and another is ZenDock Pro for MacBook Pro.

ZenDock Retina is compatible with 13 and 15 inch MacBook Retina where else ZenDock Pro is compatible with 13, 15 and 17 inch MacBook Pro.

ZenDock won’t block your audio port, memory card reader and will always leave at least one USB port untouchable. The casing is made of non-slip material for an easy grip.

You can own a copy of either ZenDock Retina or ZenDock Pro by pledging for $139 on Kickstarter. If the project goes through, the estimated date on when you will receive it is around October 2013.