Life would become much more dynamic! With augmented reality you can take useful data and information and display it appropriately in real life in real time. A big advance for augmented reality is google glass. Where you could ask your phone to find an item such as chocolate milk and google glass would create a virtual path seen through google glass straight to the nearest chocolate milk. 

Augmented reality will hopefully become mainstream as I believe it has the potential to make large steps for mankind to establish a comfortable lifestyle. Augmented reality is the ability to take something virtual and display it in a real world.

How Can Augment Reality be used with 3d Printing?

Display your Models

Imagine that you are landscape designer. Instead of presenting your customer a few drawings of the layouts, you could augment the drawing so that it becomes 3D. Imagine an anatomy textbook where the pictures can be an model you can explore. Imagine making your home look luxurious without having to spend a dime.

As I have mentioned earlier about how I dream of a day when everything inside a home is customized. The ability to preview your model before spending the time and material to print your object will be extremely useful.

I am currently making my business card/resume as an augmented reality. I will post it here when it is completed... I use an app called Augment.

Imagine printing out custom lego pieces to make a basketball court. Eventually as technology progresses, you could augment lego characters and play a video game on the model you just created.

Go a bit further and imagine a game of capture the flag in a park. You could 3D print items such as turrets, grenades, shields, etc. (not real just plastic hopefully) and then use them in your game. If you could think of it, you could print it, and it would become almost real to your brain.

In a professional sense, my current internship is designing airplanes in which this could be used to show aerodynamics. Yes this could be presented on a screen, but it would be a much better presentation if you could interact and control what you see. For example I could print the airplane, a bird flock, rain, etc. And then how the objects where moved could display them. This is a bit hard to explain, perhaps this vide will help:

Sixth Sense Technology

There is also a movement that I find awesome, called Sixth Sense Technology, which takes a projector attached to you to place augmented images in front of you. I would highly recommend also looking into Sixth Sense Technology and even trying the open source code which can be found here:
https://code.google.com/p/sixthsense/

Please leave your comments.

and as always thanks for visiting,
The 3D Printing Ninja
3DNinjaneer@gmail.com