When it comes to the future, it is clear that the concept of the “Internet of Things” holds sway. This idea – which states that all objects will someday be identifiable thanks to a virtual representations on the internet – is at the center of a great deal of innovation that drives our modern economy. Be it wearables, wireless, augmented reality, voice or image recognition, that which helps us combine the real with the virtual are on the grow.

And so it’s really no surprise that innovators are looking to take augmented reality to the next level. The fruit of some of this labor is Blippar, a market-leading image-recognition and augmented reality platform. Lately, they have been working on a proof of concept for Google Glass showing that 3-D searches are doable. This sort of technology is already available n the form of apps for smartphones, but a central database is lacking that could any device into a visual search engine.

As Ambarish Mitra, the head of Blippar stated, AR is already gaining traction among consumers thanks to some of the world’s biggest industrial players recognizing the shift to visually mediated lifestyles. Examples include IKEA’s interactive catalog, Heinz’s AR recipe booklet or Amazon’s recent integration of the Flow AR technology into its primary shopping app. As this trend continues, we will need a Wikipedia-like database for 3-D objects that will be available to us anytime, anywhere.

Social networks and platforms like Instagram, Pinterest, Snapchat and Facebook have all driven a cultural shift in the way people exchange information. This takes the form of text updates, instant messaging, and uploaded images. But as the saying goes, “a picture is worth a thousand words”. In short, information absorbed through visual learning has a marked advantage over that which is absorbed through reading and text.

In fact, a recent NYU study found that people retain close to 80 percent of information they consume through images versus just 10 percent of what they read. If people are able to regularly consume rich content from the real world through our devices, we could learn, retain, and express our ideas and information more effectively. Naturally, there will always be situations where text-based search is the most practical tool, but searches arise from real-world experiences.

Right now, text is the only option available, and oftentimes, people are unable to best describe what they are looking for. But an image-recognition technology that could turn any smartphone, tablet or wearable device into a scanner that could identify any 3-D object would vastly simplify things. Information could be absorbed in a more efficient way, using an object’s features and pulling up information from a rapidly learning engine.

For better or for worse, wearable designs of consumer electronics have come to reflect a new understanding in the past few years. Basically, they have come to be extensions of our senses, much as Marshall McCluhan wrote in his 1964 book Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. Google Glass is representative of this revolutionary change, a step in the direction of users interacting with the environment around them through technology.

Leading tech companies are already investing time and money into the development of their own AR products, and countless patents and research allocations are being made with every passing year. Facebook’s acquisition of virtual reality company Oculus Rift is the most recent example, but even Samsung received a patent earlier this year for a camera-based augmented reality keyboard that is projected onto the fingers of the user.

Augmented reality has already proven itself to be a multi-million dollar industry – with 60 million users and around half a billion dollars in global revenues in 2013 alone. It’s expected to exceed $1 billion annually by 2015, and combined with a Google-Glass type device, this AR could eventually allow individuals to build vast libraries of data that will be the foundation for finding any 3-D object in the physical world.

In other words, the Internet of Things will become one step closer, with an evolving database of visual information at the base of it that is becoming ever larger and (in all likelihood) smarter. Oh dear, I sense another Skynet reference coming on! And in the meantime, enjoy this video that showcases Blippar’s vision of what this future of image overlay and recognition will look like:

Source: wired.com, dashboardinsight.com, blippar.com