Honestly, I find it difficult to say exactly when it started, but from a certain moment, everyone suddenly began to care about augmented reality. Not that it has become the main technology, but for some reason many developers have begun to use it in their applications. Google especially distinguished itself, which translated into augmented reality and navigation in Google Maps, and online excursions in Arts & Culture, and even made a virtual AR-roulette, with which it became possible to measure the dimensions of various kinds of objects. But how accurate are these measurements? I checked it on my own experience.
On Android there are tons of applications for measuring objects
For measurements, I downloaded the Google Measure app for Android (download), 'Roulette' for iOS and took a regular construction tape that I got from the master who laid the tiles in my bathroom. I didn't steal it, the master just turned out to be forgetful, and I didn't call back and notify that he had forgotten his instrument. However, why am I? And to the fact that since a person laid the tiles perfectly evenly, it means that he does not use mediocre tools, which means that you can trust my trophy. Therefore, I take an ordinary tape measure as a standard and will compare all measurements with it.
Ruler app for Android
Roulette turned out to be more accurate than the application, albeit not much
I decided to start measuring from the height of the Malm dresser from IKEA. Despite the fact that, according to the information on the official website of the Swedish company, it is 78 cm, the tape measure showed slightly different figures – 77.5 cm.Then I decided to check its accuracy on the length with which the plug also came out. According to official data, it is 160 cm, and according to my tape measure – 160.5 cm. Only the depth converged. In both cases, 48 cm came out. To make sure that my tape measure was accurate, I measured the height and width of the washing machine and microwave with it – everything turned out to be normal. From this, I conclude that IKEA allows small errors in the calculations. Well, okay, that's not the point.
The first thing after the tape measure, I took measurements using Google Measure. I launched the application, calibrated it, and measured it. All three times the height turned out to be different: 77 cm, 80 cm, 139 cm. But if two measurements out of three, in general, roughly correspond to reality, then the third turned out to be completely wrong. This happened due to the fact that all three measurements were made from different distances: the closer I brought the smartphone with the application to the object of measurement, the greater the result. But I did not succeed in making a full measurement of the width and depth of the chest of drawers, because every time the application failed to set focus, and it required a more contrasting background (my chest of drawers is pure white). That is, if you need to measure the desired distance on a plastered wall, nothing will come of it.
Can I measure with a smartphone
Roulette from Apple has even worse performance. Everything that I tried to measure with its help, everything turned out to be 10-15 centimeters less. Therefore, I came to the conclusion that this measurement application does not fit the word at all, and therefore abandoned it in the middle of the experiment. But since it was impossible to throw the experiment halfway, I decided to continue the measurements only with the help of a regular tape measure and Google Measure, since we can assume that they reached the final.
Apps are very easy to deceive, even if you are not pursuing such a goal
As a final experiment, I took a scale from Xiaomi, which has a square shape with a side of 28 cm. These are both the official numbers and the result of my tape measure. But the Google Measure application even managed to fix it. I took measurements three times, and again I got different results: 26, 27, 29 cm.They differed from each other depending on how close the smartphone was to them, and the closer I brought it to the scales, the greater the result. This means that things are not in the best way with the accuracy of this kind of applications.
At some point, I still managed to get up so that I got the cherished 28 cm at the scales and 78.5 cm at the chest of drawers. But for this I had to approach and move away from the measurement object several times. That is, it turns out that the accuracy of the software depends on the distance from which the measurements are made. Therefore, it makes no sense to use apps like Google Measure for accurate measurements – for example, for home repairs. Well, since inaccurate measurements, as a rule, are not needed by anyone, I recommend using only ordinary tape measures.