Justin, with his Android phone, will shrug his Google-loving shoulders and say “who cares?”, but I’m excited. My iPhone just got a new App this morning called Robotvision, a piece of Augmented Reality technology that overlays real-time business and restaurant information, as well as other fun stuff, onto my phone’s 3GS camera view.
I hold my iPhone up, look for, say, Bars and Restaurants within a mile, and BAM! Flags showing the nearest options hover in front of me. Tap on a restaurant to get the address, driving directions through the map app, or to call with the oft-forgotten phone functionality that my gadget possesses. Tap to search bing and get a summary of their hours, ratings, photos of the place, etc. Lay the iPhone down and a map view appears, all of the tagged locations raining down in pin drop formation.
I can also see all of the nearest Tweets and Flickr photos with a click of a button. Less useful, but novel and fun.
This is a preview of the Augmented Reality of our future. Human vision? Bah! It’s time for Robotvision.
It seems that reality just isn’t cutting it anymore. We humans want to supersize reality, layer more and more stuff on top of reality to really trick it out. Innovative folks out there have been working to develop Augmented Reality technology since 1992, creating applications that blend our real physical world with computer-generated virtual imagery, and the results are pretty darn interesting.
