Enter Augment, an Android and iOS app which uses augmented reality to let you visualize how products will look in your home. If you want to see a product in your environment, just click the "try it on" button on Augment-connected ecommerce sites, and Augment will open and overlay the "item" anywhere you point your smartphone or tablet camera. You can push the item far away, bring it closer, push it flush against the wall or rotate it. The app intends to minimize the risk of buying large items — you know exactly how it will fit into your space and how it'll look — and this technology could be a huge boon for ecommerce sales. A 3D rendering of each product is ll Augment needs to provide the virtual try-on.

We spoke with founder Jean-François Chianetta at the Austin Convention Center during SXSWi. Check out the video above to see how Augment works. Would Augment make you more inclined to purchase large items online? Tell us in the comments.

Trekking to IKEA is often an exercise in futility. The armchairs and bookcases never look as perfect in your cramped apartment as they do in the color-coordinated showrooms. After 15 minutes, you're tired and overwhelmed and you can't remember what you even came for.

IKEA's 2014 catalog aims to ease some of that angst by letting you plan ahead with its augmented reality feature.

Simply place the catalog in the spot where you're considering adding a new piece of furniture, scan the catalog with the augmented reality app on your mobile device and select the desired item.

The augmented reality feature then projects the item into your home by layering it over a real-time view of your room captured through your device's camera. The app also lets you experience the scale of the objects in relation to your living space, as you can see in the video above.

IKEA's 2013 catalog included smartphone integration, but only featured videos and photo galleries that could be accessed via an app by scanning the catalog's pages.

This year's catalog also includes several highly anticipated new releases, such as the Lövbacken table, a revival of the company's original flat-pack table produced in 1956.

The 2014 catalog will be available in print, as well as on iPhone, iPad and Android.

Do you think IKEA's concept for an augmented reality catalog will catch on with other furniture sellers? Let us know your thoughts in the comments.

At its core, the idea behind AR is to bring additional context to the "real" world. With the advent of smartphones and tablets, the potential for AR to add context in real-life tasks including finding your way around or fixing a car becomes an actual possibility.

Although AR gained more mainstream recognition over the last few years, most AR projects are confined to designated proof-of-concepts or specific experiences wrapped around a specific app. German company Metaio wants to change that, and its goal is to bring augmented reality everywhere.

To do that, Metaio is focused on brining AR to every smartphone and focusing on helping developers and companies build AR apps.

Building AR Apps That Matter

Over the years, we've seen lots of apps with AR features built in, and most of them are of a more promotional nature. The idea was less about showing the useful potential of AR and more about showcasing the cool-factor of the technology itself.

That makes sense, in part because it's not easy for developers to figure out how to build AR features and functionality into their apps, websites or physical products.

That's what Metaio is trying to solve with its Metaio Creator tool. Designed for coders and non-coders alike, the Metaio Creator lets users add 3D models, video and other graphical content to print media.

That makes it easier for a catalog company to show off 3D rotating models of a piece of furniture or for a product maker to embed an installation video to the pages of a manual.

The idea is to make AR as a concept mainstream enough that apps will exist and be useful — hopefully without becoming ubiquitous yet unused, like the unfortunate QR code.

Bringing AR to Every Smartphone

At Mobile World Congress 2013, I spoke with Trak Lord from Metaio about the future of AR and what's holding it back now. Performance, Lord says, is one of the core problems with making AR mainstream in larger-than-life installations.

Right now, if you use an AR app on even the latest and greatest smartphone, changes are there will be some stutter in the graphical display. The experience isn't 100% seamless.

To solve that problem — as well as furthering adoption and developer interest in AR — Metaio partnered with ST-Ericsson to create the first augmented reality chipset for mobile phones.

Smartphones already have chipsets for graphics, Bluetooth/WiFi/LTE and any host of other services, why not something just for AR? Dubbed AREngine, the ST-Ericsson/Metaio project aims to do for the AR industry what the GPU did for gaming.

An AR-focused chipset also means the battery implications of current AR apps could be dissipated, in part because AR functionality would be controlled by its own dedicated hardware. That also means that app developers could target a specific AR framework on a chip, rather than having to write just to an SDK on an app and hope the phone or tablet could function.

The first smartphones with the AREngine IP are expected to start appearing later this fall and Metaio is bullish on wanting AR in every smartphone by 2014

The Future of AR

Tablets and smartphones are great, but the real potential of AR is in applications that are directly in your field of view. That's why Google Glass is so exciting.

If anything, Google Glass might be the best thing that ever happened to AR, because it brings a visual image of what the experience can be to a greater consciousness.

In fact, one of the biggest potential assets of wearable computing is the context and real-time visualizations promised by AR. For Metaio, the promise of this sort of technology is exciting because it aligns with its end-goal of bringing AR everywhere.

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When they go on sale in a couple of years, will Google's augmented reality glasses – a slick metal monobrow, with a thumbnail-sized screen hovering above the right eye – turn us all into the kind of person in the saccharine teaser ad that's circulating on the web?

After reluctantly accepting that Project Glass was not one of Google's April Fools' hoaxes (which included Gmail Tap, morse code to replace the qwerty keyboard for "people with fat fingers"), I found it hard to decide what was more disturbing: the AR glasses themselves or the ad's exemplary user. Floating around New York, he is supposed to be an empowered explorer, connected to the wider world with nothing more than a twitch of his head and a friendly yet imperious voice command – but it's actually more like he's suffering from locked-in syndrome. It's no coincidence that the head-first point of view of the ad feels intolerably claustrophobic.

Technically, there is a huge gap between the immersive experience that the video illustrates and the actual capability of AR glasses now or in the near future. But it's the very idealised status of the ad that makes it worth taking seriously. This is how Google expects us to behave, "one day … "

First of all, our protagonist doesn't appear to have to work. Instead he has a mission that day: learn to play the ukulele, like every good hipster should. A reminder appears before his eyes that he has to "see" Jess tonight at 6.30 (the meeting will in fact be mediated by face-mounted webcam). Then a plea arrives from a friend he has apparently been neglecting for quite a while. The reply he dictates – "Meet me in front of Strand Books at 2" – leaves no room for negotiation. He's going to the bookstore anyway, so won't have to take a second out of his busy schedule. The morning routine of AR man apparently does not include reading the news, or indeed sparing a thought for anything outside his (Google) circle. The worst thing that happens to this guy all day is that his subway line isn't running – which he would have found out in reality 10 seconds after his glasses informed him.

He is already living a kind of augmented, extremely privileged reality. What the AR glasses do is eliminate any remaining friction from his world. Friendship, music, graffiti ("Oh cool!" he says before taking a photo with his eyes), and love all become neutered, benign experiences that exist only to serve him. Maybe worst of all, in Google's AR-world, everyone is always extremely, inexplicably relaxed. (Though I swear the friend casts a funny look when they first meet up – noticing these ridiculous things he's wearing on his head.)

As a communique emerging from Google's secret "X" labs, the Project Glass ad must proclaim revolution without feeling in the least bit threatening. Google has nevertheless dared to declare a couple of ideological ambitions. First, "technology should work for you", helping you "explore and share your world". But it's the user who becomes the real slave, surrendering to Google any remaining shreds of intuition and agency. And it's not "your world"; it's the world. Deal with it. Google's second imperative is cool because it's really Zen: these glasses help put you "back in the moment". This is a shockingly Orwellian statement about a device that is essentially a disguise, making it infinitely easier for the user to be outside the moment, at any given moment, without anyone else knowing.

When someone is distracted by their smartphone mid-conversation, it's blatant. With Google Glass the interface – the device itself – starts to become integrated, clumsily, for now, into our person. This may be disturbing on an ethical level – a prosthesis that secretly enhances rather than simply corrects, like, say, spectacles.

But it's also misjudged on a behavioural level. What Google is forgetting is that it's the interface itself that forms the addictive attachment people have to email, Twitter, news, Angry Birds, whatever. Checking our phone requires a distinct and visible physical act, and we like performing this action. The feeling of clutching this small object is just as important as the content we're consuming. Using a phone sends a deliberate and transparent antisocial signal, allowing us to do what we really want to do: not augment reality with layers of redundant information, but escape from reality, if only for a few seconds. Somehow the honesty and liberation of this is much more appealing than becoming an insidiously augmented Superman, just a really nice guy pretending to be "in the moment".