Augmented reality: the hottest new apps from around the world

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:

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

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 to 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:

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:

Time people spend with mobile devices continues to rise as a direct result of 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 device's enhanced positioning and recognition capabilities is not limited to phones. Increasingly, MP3 players and gaming devices come loaded with the appropriate technology:

This article was first published on revolutionmagazine.com