Hasta La Ideas

Sony might have lost the portable music player and smartphone war, but it’s too soon to count them out of the product design space. What they need is a hit or a killer app to put them back in the game, and since they’ve lost points on hardware, perhaps they’ll make it back in software. Take a look at “SmartAR,” the augmented reality technology they’ve been messing around with in their skunkworks:

Needless to say, the ability to photograph barcode-less items in the real world and get instant information on them could be huge, a sort of away-from-a-home-computer Google. What remains to be seen is if Sony can bring it to the masses in a palatable format and, of course, what Google will counteroffer if SmartAR takes off.

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