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Smartphones Get "Reality Overlay" App
Michael_Curator writes to tell us that mobile phones now have a "reality overlay" app that combines a smartphone's camera, GPS, and compass to augment a user's view of a particular location with metadata. "It works as follows: Starting up the Layar application automatically activates the camera. The embedded GPS automatically knows the location of the phone and the compass determines in which direction the phone is facing. Each [commercial] partner provides a set of location coordinates with relevant information which forms a digital layer. By tapping the side of the screen the user easily switches between layers."
You simpleminded dilettante.
Imagine a ratebeer.com layer permanently on your phone.
Whenever you're in a new city, filter by whatever beer you like, or for pubs within the top 20% ratings for the city.
And it's called augmented reality. Reinventing the wheel is bad for society but good for egos.
If it weren't for people reinventing the wheel, we wouldn't have rubber tires, tank treads, and chrome spinnaz!
I am the richest astronaut ever to win the superbowl.
Sounds a lot like the tech in Vernor Vinge's Rainbow's End. Once again, the prescience of SF...
When Google StreetView can get the street numbers right, this might actually work.
For now, it's just going to be another ad delivery system.
The cool app for this would be one that, when you enter a restaurant or store, sounds an alarm if the business has a problem, like a poor Yelp rating, a poor BBB rating, a poor health department rating, etc.
For those of you who read Wm Gibson's Virtual Light (1994) I'd guess we're a step closer ... :-)
If you haven't read it, the book centers around a pair of special glasses that sport "Virtual Light". The concept of VL adds optical data for the wearer. In the book, this can be whatever supplemental data you've uploaded. Load the right data, and when you look at a garden though the VL glasses, you get a little tag overlayed on each plant, telling you that plant's name and other info. Cops might see forensic data overlayed when they look at a crime scene. Or a land developer might see future, planned buildings in place of what's there now.
In the book, the macguffin was supposedly the Virtual Light glasses, but really it was the data on them and what it meant to the data owner.