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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."
Think "Terminator Vision". Red hue optional.
Proud member of the American Non Sequitur Society. We might not make much sense, but boy do we love pizza!
Excellent, now the entire world is like a guided museum tour.
'And on our right here, we have the parking lot that is affectionately nicknamed 'The Hobo's Restroom'. Please watch your step.'
I wake up in the darkness, totally lost. I fumble for my smartphone, knowing it's the only was I'll manage to reach home before dawn.
What I see is not comforting.
"It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue."
Slashdot: news for Apple. Stuff that Apple.
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.
"Here are all the trees and bushes nearby big enough to pee behind"
Sounds a lot like the tech in Vernor Vinge's Rainbow's End. Once again, the prescience of SF...
/unimpressed.
Call when they develop THIS app.
http://www.pictureshack.net/images/9846newlayar.JPG
(Yes, it's sloppy; it was a very quick photoshop.)
-Styopa
How long will it take for the National Sex Offender Registry overlay to be created? Then you can be sure your kids are safer, when your phone alerts you to a nearby sex offender. http://www.familywatchdog.us/
"We're gonna need a bigger boat"
Of course, due to local magnetic anomalies his compass is three degrees off and it's the wrong door...
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
That's where the term "intrepid explorer" comes into play.
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.
First off, you're thinking of Wikitude, and I agree, it's not original, the idea's been around for a while, it just hasn't been entirely feasible till now.
;)
But it's far from useless. Just because YOU don't have a use for it doesn't mean others don't. I, for instance, am a huge astronomy buff, and think that Google Sky Map is very cool. Instead of spending an hour orienting and aligning my telescope to Polaris, and constantly tweaking it, I can point my phone at the sky and it's tell me what I'm looking at and where to find other objects. Very handy for me, not so handy for someone who doesn't go outside.
Last year I spent a week in Europe, including Prague, and would've loved to have Wikitude point out building data and points of interest. It's a brilliant tool for tourists.
The technology is VERY useful, but it's only in it's infancy right now. Once upon a time people thought GPS was useless when it was first introduced to the commercial sector. Now many people can barely drive without it. Whether you like it or not, semantically associating data online with reality is the future, and makes that data infinitely more useful.
PS - Maybe you'd find a use for it if you ever went outside
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.