Clean your house with the power of augmented reality! Unbelievers cruelly mocked the “metaverse,” but now its true “killer app” has been revealed!

Background:

One of the various promises of “augmented reality” (or “AR”) is the ability for a user to wear a virtual reality headset that edits reality in some vaguely useful fashion.

For example, a maintenance worker might be able to overlay a diagram of the wiring inside walls, giving them a sort of “x-ray vision.”

The Issue:

So far, there have been few appealing consumer applications of “augmented reality.” But that is about to change!

Imagine the following situation: a person lives in a completely messy room (Figure 1), with junk piled up everywhere, spilled drinks, dirty laundry, etc.

***Fig. 1:*** *This desk area is a mess! We could clean it—but maybe there’s a better way.*

Currently, the only recourse this mess-owning individual has is to laboriously clean their room. But technology may offer an alternative.

Proposal:

Thanks to augmented reality, the user can just put on a headset and (after a brief training period, where the user must indicate which items are “messes” that should be deleted), their room will be presented in a completely clean form—no more stress!

***Fig. 2:*** *Thanks to the power of augmented reality, the desk has been cleaned to its “reference, clean” state.*

If the user is willing to clean the room at least one single time, it would be possible for the VR headset to save a 3D “snapshot” of the clean room, which would then be displayed no matter how disgusting the room got.

This would save the user from having to manually designate each item as “mess” or “clean,” but would require that the user clean their room at least one time.

Conclusion:

Even people who keep a relatively orderly home could benefit from this technology, as it would redue the need for vacuuming, dusting, repainting, etc. A room could be caked in dust, with a cat-hair-infused rug and peeling paint, but thanks to augmented reality, this could all be safely ignored. (And there would be no tripping hazards in this scenario.)

PROS: Should save countless hours of recurring cleaning.

CONS: Since the “mess” items still physically exist, some hazards might be erroneously hidden: for example, imagine the calamity that could befall a user who hides their “pile of broken glass and hypodermic needles in the middle of the room” mess.