In the fin-tech wold, it has become the standard to use video ident to set up a new bank account. What could only be done face-to-face in e.g. the post office (at least in Germany), is now possible from your living room in a matter of minutes.
Talking of banking: Apps like Deliveroo and Apple Pay started using the camera to scan your credit card, removing the painstaking process of manually entering in every character.
Making use of the camera to provide assistance to the user is nothing new. Apps like Amazon and momox allowed you to find products by scanning their bar code for some time now. Snapchat Codes make it easy to share your contact with others and was even adopted by Spotify to quickly share songs (although I’m not sure how successful of a feature it has become).
However, with advances in image detection, more sensors, and on-device machine learning, it is now possible to use the camera in creative and very useful ways (and yes, also for fun Snapchat filter turning you into a baby version of yourself).
Google Lens is getting more and more powerful and allows you to identify most objects just by pointing at them. Similarly,
Pinterest is working intensely on ways to find exactly the sneaker you took a picture of.
Last year, Google showed us the future of navigation with the introduction of augmented reality in Google Maps. I always thought it was only me who is unable to find the right direction, but it turns out I’m not alone, which makes me very happy. One year later, Google is finally launching the feature on Pixel devices and the technology behind it is truly impressive. No wonder they
encountered many roadblocks along the way (pun intended).
Which leads us to Augmented Reality.
Just last week, Nike introduced a
new version of its app. The goal is to find you the perfect-sized sneaker, not too small and not too big. Something a person in the shop would usually do for you, but in the age of online shopping, they are nowhere to be found.
Meanwhile,
Apple and
Google are hard at work to ship updates to their AR frameworks and you can expect new announcements very soon at Apple’s developer conference
WWDC on June 3–7. Both of these frameworks (ARKit and ARCore) allow developers to make use of the power of augmented reality and built-in tools for measurement, tracking and more.
IKEA landed a big hit last year with a new app that lets you virtually put the new sofa in your living room and I think we will see many more clever use cases coming in the next months and years.