Expert advice from the Fresh team

By Gareth Jones, revolutionmagazine.com, 17 July 2009, 1:18pm

LONDON - Unless you live in a cupboard you'll be aware of the massive potential of augmented reality. There are scores of cool new AR apps emerging at the moment. Here are some of the best courtesy of Rubbishcorp.

AR isn’t new, but as positioning and recognition technology becomes ubiquitous it will find a much larger audience. Devices sporting geotagging, triangulation, recognition, wireless and compass technology have improved the virtual/physical mobile experience as they now work together seemlessly serve everyone with masses of information layered over the ‘real’ world:

Geotagging

No longer will you have to haplessly unfold a map at a museum, search endlessly for the semolina in a supermarket or not know exactly how many more meters to the bar:

Museum Map

And on top of that it’s no longer just inanimate objects that are able to tell you their secrets. This TAT demo enables you set a profile (linking to your social networks, media, personal data etc) that can be viewed by anyone who points an iPhone at you. Your face becomes the gateway to your data and you can change that data to fit with your current surroundings and/or depending on who it is you want to know/not know:

TAT Demo

RFID technology can also register objects within close proximity and pull data from a connected online source. ViPR technology can recognise actual objects via a connected database:

ViPR

Time people spend with mobile devices continues to rise as a direct result the increasing usefulness of the technology in making connections in the ‘physical’ space. And interestingly the raft of AR apps that make use of a devices enhanced positioning and recognition capabilities isn’t limited to phones. Increasingly MP3 players and gaming devices come loaded with the appropriate technology:

Gaming

Source: Revolution Magazine