Worldwide spending for the Internet of Things (IoT) is expected to grow at a 17-percent Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) from $698.6 billion in 2015 to nearly $1.3 trillion in 2019, according to a new International Data Corp. (IDC) Spending Guide. Much of the growth is expected to come from the Asia/Pacific region, followed by North America and Western Europe.

Because of this growth in connected devices, the need to easily control these devices is critical. Yes, they can be controlled using specific apps on a smartphone, but then that would entail launching multiple apps to control an entire smart home. Good thing researcher Valentin Heun, from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Fluid Interfaces Lab, has come up with an amazing new app that makes the connected world a lot more fun to handle. 

A result of three years of research, Reality Editor is an augmented reality app that allows users to connect and manipulate physical objects around them. The app allows users to create connections between different devices by just pointing the camera at the object the user wants to manipulate and then drawing a line. This, of course, will only work if the devices you want to manipulate have special markings that the app can recognize.

How Reality Editor works

To better understand how it works, a good example is the simple task of turning lights on or off. The usual way is by getting up and flipping the switch. But with Reality Editor, the user just points their smartphone’s camera to the object they want to manipulate, tap on the screen and the light goes on or off. To make hybrid objects work together, just draw a line from one object to another. So if the user wants the lights to turn off when they’re to turn in, they just draw a line from the bed to the light switch. Then when the user goes to bed, the light turns off.

Users can also borrow features from one device to another. If they want their lights to turn off at a certain time, they can borrow the timer feature of their television. They just draw a line from the TV to the light. Another example is setting the right temperature in the user’s car. Just draw a line from the bed to the car, and the user will have the perfect temperature inside when they are ready to drive off to work.

Everything sounds like science fiction, right? But it’s not. The Reality Editor is available for download for iOS devices and uses Open Hybrid, an open-source platform to build a new generation of Hybrid Objects.

What Heun and his team have come up with is probably the simplified version of a universal platform for IoT. Though this may be a great solution to connect all things, it won’t stop companies such as Intel Corp. and Qualcomm from establishing a universal IoT communications protocol.

Image source: Reality Editor