Augmented reality: are we about to see it become really interesting?
Augmented reality seems to be the buzzword on everyone's lips, but at the moment it seems more to hang around the "gimmick" categories than the real lifechanging stuff that it could be capable of. But with magnetometers now beginning to become standard kit in phones, are we soon to see a raft of more interesting applications?
Magnetometers (or three dimensional compasses in laymans' terms), already embedded in the G1 Android phone and hotly rumoured to be included in the next-gen iPhone expected out later this year (www.macrumors.com), are capable of adding directional data to pure GPS geo-location. The result can be seen in the not-so-good quality video linked to this post: demonstrating Google Street View being controlled directionally by the movement and direction of the Android phone.
It doesn't take much of a leap of imagination to see where that could lead…
