LG To Debut Vacuum Cleaner With Augmented Reality At CES 2016

Augmented reality is a pretty cool piece of technology. For those unfamiliar, basically it overlays digital information on top of the real-world, so for example you could point your camera at an object, and digital information like its brand, size, and availability could be displayed on your screen, saving you the awkward question of asking the person where they bought their sweater from.

Interestingly enough it seems that LG has decided that augmented reality has a use in the home as well, and will be introducing it to their upcoming HOM-BOT Turbo+ which is a robotic vacuum cleaner that comes with augmented reality technology. As it is, robot vacuum cleaners are already pretty awesome so the addition of augmented reality technology should jazz things up.

So how does augmented reality technology apply to robot vacuum cleaners? Instead of geofencing the robots with barriers, users can use the accompanying smartphone app and augmented reality tech to point out areas of the room/home that they want the HOM-BOT Turbo+ to clean.

According to LG, “This exciting new user interface allows consumers to issue instructions to the vacuum cleaner by intuitively designating areas that need extra cleaning using the camera of any smartphone. Simply tap on the part of the room in the image to clean and HOM-BOT Turbo+ goes to that exact location and begins cleaning.”

It’s a bit hard to imagine if this feature will be useful or merely novel, but LG will debut the robot at CES 2016 so we guess we’ll have to wait until then to find out.

Tyler Lee
Categories: Gadgets, Home, Robots
Tags: Augmented Reality (AR), CES, CES 2016, LG