New York, USA (Business Wire) – Augumenta Ltd., a Finland-based software provider, has announced and demonstrated development tools that define a new user interface for navigation and control of applications running on smart glass devices.
The Augumenta Interaction Platform provides smart glass application developers with a dynamic gesture vocabulary for commands and a first-of-its-kind interactive virtual surface toolkit. Virtual surfaces are privately viewable images that are seen only by the smart glass user and respond to such inputs as data entry on a numbered keypad or moving slider bars to change a machine setting.
“We believe smart glasses are a truly new class of computing platform and so require new navigation tools,” said Tero Aaltonen, Co-Founder and CEO of Augumenta. “With both natural, intuitive navigation and an entirely new way to define control surfaces seen only by a glass wearer, developers will be able to craft applications that dramatically enhance productivity for mobile professionals and, ultimately, create consumer applications that go far beyond simple information access.”
Augumenta believes that mobile worker applications across many different industries – from field service, factory floor and job sites to medical professions – will be areas of fast growth for smart glass deployment in the next few years. A brief video produced by Augumenta uses several user scenarios to illustrate the simplicity and power available to developers of professional and consumer applications.
The ability to launch applications by pointing at displayed icons is the first step to navigating through data and controlling tasks. In an industrial setting, slider bars created as a virtual surface can be used to control machine operations. Secure, private data entry using a virtual keypad (which can automatically scramble its characters) allows electronic door entry or point-of-sale verification.
Identify verification is just the start of many potential consumer market applications. Multi-user interaction, demonstrated with a simple game of “Rock, Paper, Scissors” hints at the future for gaming and other new consumer facing applications.
Now in limited beta release for select OEM partners, the Augumenta Interaction Platform for gesture-based navigation and control will be generally available to developers in the fourth quarter of 2014. The virtual surface design and control functionality module will be released in early 2015.
