Imagine being able to point your iPhone at something and seeing hidden notes and information that only your phone knows are there. This is called Augmented Reality, and it’s currently coming to the iPhone.
Augmented reality is difficult to explain, but basically it is a system of information that is overlaid on the real world. When you move around in the real world and you have your iPhone with you, you can use the phone’s camera to view this information on your iPhone screen.
Science fiction writers such as William Gibson have played around with augmented reality, using a concept that Gibson calls locative art. In Gibson’s novels, a person can walk around with a virtual reality helmet and view works of art that only exist in cyberspace. As they walk past a certain point in the real world, they will see something there that isn’t actually real, but is a virtual image.
Real-life augmented reality is similar. One application of augmented reality on the iPhone is an application called TwittAround, which uses location information from Twitter users’ tweets and displays them where they were created. For instance, you can look through your iPhone screen, using the camera to see a view of the world around you, and see tweets precisely where people left them. This has enormous potential as an expansion to Twitter, as well as a marketing tool.
Take a look on this video:
Other applications of augmented reality on the iPhone include live directions. You can hold the iPhone up, with the screen on, and directions will appear in front of you as if you were following personalized signs on the road. There is also an augmented reality browser known as Layar which is making its way to the iPhone, which allows you to point your iPhone camera at a place or object and see the place’s web site and information immediately hovering over it on your screen.
Augmented reality is being applied elsewhere besides the iPhone, for instance, users of computers with webcams will soon be able to view magazine advertisements through their webcams and see three dimensional images appear as their screen, as if holographically hovering over their magazine. Another is a museum in Japan where visitors can wear virtual reality helmets and look at computer models of live dinosaurs moving around the museum.
When augmented reality becomes mainstream, the iPhone is sure to be the first and foremost outlet for this exciting technology to be introduced.
