Career Choice: How To Launch An Augmented Reality Career

Artificial intelligence is here and there is no turning back. Thanks to new technology that powers AI, we are able to interact with our surroundings in a way never thought possible.

Let’s take a closer look at augmented reality, who is building the apps that bring it to life and how you can join their ranks.

What Is Augmented Reality?

Augmented reality is one of the offshoots of the new AI trend. While using augmented reality apps, users are able to point their smartphone cameras at objects and be provided with information laid over top of them.

This allows users to see the specifications of buildings they are in front of, know the identity of different types of plants and trees they encounter, or even see how a piece of new furniture may look or fit within their home.

Augmented reality apps use what is called a tracker, which serves as the focal point of the smartphone-enabled reality. Users simply have to aim their smartphone camera at a particular object and the AI software identifies it and provides everything from species classifications to dimensions such as height, length and width.

As the user moves their smartphone, the tracker moves with it. This allows users to see how buildings might fit elsewhere within a city block, or how well that new chair you keep eyeing online would fit inside your living room.

How We Use Augmented Reality

Have you ever been in the woods and come across a plant you were afraid might be poisonous? Maybe you panicked and pulled out your smartphone to search Google with the hope of identifying the plant. 

The search results likely gave you the identity of several different plants, all of which looked very similar to the one you needed to identify. Some were poisonous, others were not. Maybe you were left very concerned, not knowing whether you just grazed through poisonous plants or not.

If you had been using an augmented reality app, your concern could have been avoided in a flash. You would have just pointed your smartphone camera at the plant and it would have identified the exact species of plant. If fact, the app would have likely told you the species whether it was poisonous or not and also overlaid the same information on your screen for all the surrounding plants.

If You Build It, They Will Use It

There is a lot of coding that goes into writing the process that enables smartphone cameras to capture and hold a certain image and then transmit environmental data back onto the screen. It requires direction sensing, as well as constantly changing graphic imaging and information generation.

But many of the software engineers who build and maintain augmented reality apps don’t have a bachelor’s degree in computer science, or sometimes a degree at all. Rather, there are some excellent schools with competitive programs that produce qualified software engineers. If you are looking to break into the world of coding and software development, this is an excellent way to do it. 

AI apps are much easier to build than you might think, allowing companies to crank them out at a high rate. These companies need software developers.  A software engineering bootcamp can get you up to speed on all the necessary skills you need to create AI software.

Author bio 

Artur Meyster is the CTO of Career Karma (YC W19), an online marketplace that matches career switchers with coding bootcamps. He is also the host of the Breaking Into Startups podcast, which features people with non-traditional backgrounds who broke into tech.
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