This app lets your devices (from your lights to your chair) interact with each other so that you can control your environment
Reality Editor, is a phone app out of science fiction
Ever wish that you could just control your whole world with a remote control? Your lazy dreams have now turned into reality.
A new phone tool called "Reality Editor" designed by Valentin Heun, a researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, aims to alter your world by helping connect objects to each other digitally.
The app could be used to connect the lights in a person's office to their chair and so when they leave, the lights automatically turn off. Taking it further, the light and chair could also be connected to that person's car, ensuring it turns the air-conditioner inside it is on and has the radio tuned to her favourite station.
And all of this can be connected through a simple interface on the phone.
"Just point the camera of your smartphone at an object and its invisible capabilities will become visible for you to edit. Drag a virtual line from one object to another and create a new relationship between these objects. With this simplicity, you are able to master the entire scope of connected objects," the official page for the app explains.
Much of this wouldn't work with your existing appliances, of course, because they're unlikely to be 'smart'. But with most of the objects we interact with now coming with little programmable chipsets of their own, a vision of a future where we edit the world around us to be more efficient isn't so unbelievable.
What would be even more interesting over time would be if our objects and appliances learnt to do this on their own, with the lamp just realising it has to turn off when the person gets up from the chair. As can be expected from any futuristic technology, this will come with lots of glitches, but the potential idea is still fascinating.
Available for download on the iPhone app store along with an open source platform called "Open Hybrid". You can read more on the amazing albeit confusing technology here.