Are you ready for some augmented reality (AR) apps that aren't gimmicky and pointless? So is Qualcomm. The chipset maker released its AR software development kit (SDK) for Android last fall and is preparing to launch an iOS version next month, in addition to supporting Unity's game engine for cross-platform development.
But, says Jay Wright, Senior Director of Business Development for Qualcomm, the criticisms leveraged by the tech community that AR has, so far, produced no "real world apps" are valid. "I couldn't agree more," he said, before delving into the future use cases for the platform. He also told us he's working with two big-name retailers to put out some of the first truly useful apps leveraging the technology - instruction manuals served up as AR-enabled mobile applications. These apps will show you, as opposed to telling you, how to perform complicated tasks.
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Why Qualcomm's Vision-Based AR is Different
The reason why we haven't seen these sorts of more practical implementations of AR technology has to do with how relatively new the developer tools are. The version of Qualcomm's SDK that allows for the development of AR apps for iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad, hasn't even been released yet, for example.
To be clear, there are many AR applications in mobile app stores today, including iTunes. But Qualcomm's implementation is technically different. It's offering "vision-based" AR, a computationally intensive type of AR (optimized for Qualcomm chipsets, of course) that turns the phone's camera into an eye that actually "sees" the world in front of it.
This is different technology than is found in most of the current AR apps, which typically use the phone's sensors, like the GPS and compass, to determine where you are and what you're seeing. Qualcomm's vision-based AR process involves scanning the camera frames, looking for objects, comparing those objects to a database, determining the position of those objects and then rendering animations or other digital content on top of them. At present, the database is stored in the app itself (the developer creates a limited database for use with their mobile app), but in the future, a "cloud" database will be available - meaning one stored outside the app, and accessed over the network.
Currently, Games and Gimmicks Dominate AR
As AR emerges, we're first seeing only gaming, play-oriented and advertising-based demonstrations and use cases for the technology. For instance, Qualcomm showcased several games that involve pointing your camera at inanimate objects to see characters appears on virtual gameboards. It also heavily promoted the Dallas Mavericks' implementation of AR which involved pointing your phone at a ticket or playbill to see a simple basketball-shooter game appear. Another demo, this one at yesterday's Uplinq 2011 keynote, showed DVD covers turned into movie trailers you could watch through your phone.
Future AR Use Cases
However, there are several still unexplored areas for AR's use. Visual search, for example, is one. Although there are companies, including Google and Microsoft, that offer visual search today, the process involves pointing your camera at a particular object which is then recognized and compared to an online database. AR-based visual search would be a smoother, more continuous experience, where the phone could move around and see several objects at once.
Another future use case would be the development of AR browsers, similar to the ones we have today, but that offer a better experience because of their improved alignment capabilities.
A third example would be using AR with print material, such as an ad in a magazine. Imagine a model wearing white pants, but the pants also came in three other colors. You could point your phone at the page, tap a colored box, and the pants change color. You could even turn the model around to see the back, or zoom in close to see the stitching. It would be like having an online experience with an offline medium.
But perhaps the most exciting future use case for AR is the most practical - and one that harkens back to AR's roots in aircraft assembly: virtual instruction manuals. You could point your phone at an object, like the buttons on a washing machine, a piece of computer equipment, an unassembled box of furniture parts, and be shown what to do.
When Will the Practical AR Apps Arrive?
Those apps are closer than you think. Wright says we'll see the first of these appearing this fall, in fact. He's currently in talks with two big-name retailers who will soon release mobile app instruction manuals, one of which will show how to put the ink in your printer - a task which, as anyone knows, is often more complicated and confusing than it should be.
Once people see more of these real-world examples of "practical" AR, users' perceptions may change. AR itself is not gimmicky, it's just that the way it's been implemented so far often has been.
Polar Rose, a Swedish-based facial recognition startup launched in summer 2007, is shutting down its consumer-facing service which allowed users to tag people in photos anywhere on the Web. Last spring, the innovative company introduced facial recognition to popular photo-sharing site Flickr by way of a third-party browser plugin. With the plugin installed, Polar Rose users could tag their Flickr photos with the names of their Facebook contacts and then alert those friends on Facebook that they had been tagged. It also organized Flickr photos into pages by person and could recognize people automatically in later uploads.
Unfortunately, this and all other end user-focused services are being terminated as the company switches its focus to its series of facial recognition products. Says Polar Rose's Thijs Stalenhoef, the service was "fun while it lasted."
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Polar Rose Says Goodbye to End Users, Hello to Products
According to Stalenhoef, the response to the facial recognition products introduced during the Mobile World Congress last February has been "phenomenal." These include the company's flagship FaceCloud server platform, mobile face recognition library FaceLib and FaceCore, a core face detection and recognition module for deep integration and other use-cases.
Unfortunately, the company has not been able to focus on the service at polarrose.com due to the popularity of these back-end applications and products. The Polar Rose service hasn't seen a new release in ages and support requests on GetSatisfaction have basically been ignored. "The site, as it stands today, is not up to the standard we set for it when we launched," admits Stalenhoef.
But instead of bringing on new staff to help better manage the consumer service, the company has decided to shut it down entirely. The company will close the service on PolarRose.com on September 6th, 2010 at which point all user accounts and corresponding data, including images downloaded from Facebook and Flickr, will be deleted. The tags sent to Flickr and Facebook, however, will remain in place.
Competition for End Users Ramped Up Over the Years
It's a shame to see such a compelling and interesting service disappear, but Polar Rose has had stiff competition in the consumer space as of late. Google introduced facial recognition functionality into its Picasa photo-sharing service, a Flickr competitor. Windows Live Essentials introduced facial recognition into its latest release. Also, Face.com, a facial recognition technology company, introduced multiple Facebook apps in 2009, including Photo Finder, a facial scanning service for tagging unidentified photos of Facebook friends, and later Photo Tagger, an app which automates the tagging process. And Facebook, as CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently revealed, hosts five to six times more photos than all competing photo-sharing services combined.
Meanwhile, Polar Rose may be finding its niche as the technology behind the next great facial recognition service or application. For example, last summer Polar Rose partnered with Swedish software and design company The Astonishing Tribe to create an augmented reality concept application called Augmented ID which employed Polar Rose's facial recognition technology in an app that recognized people through a mobile phone's camera in real-time. Earlier this year, the app was re-branded as Recognizr and the company announced plans to ship the app as an Android application in a matter of months. That deadline, sadly, has since come and gone.
As for Polar Rose, it's no longer alone in the licensing game, either, when it comes to facial recognition technology. Rival Face.com launched APIs (tools that allow developers to incorporate the technology into their own applications) back in May of this year. These APIs, free during the early alpha stage of testing, have already been used to power marketing campaigns by Orbit gum and Axe deodorant. Future plans could involve charges - no word yet on that. In any event, despite losing the end user service at PolarRose.com, having multiple companies vying for dominance in the facial recognition space will ultimately be a win for consumers - at least those who aren't creeped out about the technology in the first place.
When content management systems (CMS) like WordPress and Blogger hit the Web several years ago, the Internet entered a new age where it became quick and easy for anyone with a computer to contribute content. This week, augmented reality (AR) took a significant step toward becoming more like the read/write Web with the launch of an online mobile AR CMS for creating content on the Layar platform.
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"Augmentation" - a Web-based tool for generating mobile AR content - was created by Layar Partner Network member Hoppala. With a Layar developer account, users of Augmentation can easily and instantaneously place their content in Layar with zero code and a few clicks on a map. Custom icons, images, audio, video and 3D content can all be added by way of a full screen map interface, and Hoppala will even host all of the data.
The company has been providing content management solutions for Layar since launching a beta test of its Layarserver in August of 2009. This project, however, is new in that it provides a tidy user-friendly GUI for adding myriad AR data instantly to Layar. For a more detailed look at how the Augmentation Web app works, watch the video embedded below.
As more tools like Augmentation lower the bar of entry for augmented reality, a flood of AR data will begin to fill platforms like Layar, junaio and Wikitude. This progression is not unlike that of the Web with the widespread popularity of blogs. With the Web, however, powerful search engines make finding relevant content much easier and Websites are (for the most part) browser agnostic.
This is not the case with mobile AR, where content is limited to the browser it is built for. Efforts for standardization in AR will help ease this problem, but what is really needed is a new open mobile AR browser that can aggregate content from the other platforms. Looking forward, solutions like these will benefit the overall proliferation of AR, instead of fragmenting and limiting it.
Hoppala's Augmentation tool is a great next step for AR content creation, as it lets users focus on creating great content, not on the complex technical aspects of AR. That said, it signals the beginning of a new era for AR as content creation is as easy as hosting a blog. As augmented reality matures, the platforms through which we use it must mature as well.
In December of last year, augmented reality (AR) browser makers Layar chose to pull its iPhone app from the App Store due to frequent crashes reported by users. They thought it was better for their brand to remove the application than to promote a faulty product. As we've mentioned in the past, Layar had hinted that a revamped iPhone app would be out near the end of February, and earlier this week they released just that.
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With the relaunch of their iPhone app, Layar rejoins acrossair, Wikitude and others now vying for elbow room in the mobile AR space. Layar boasts one of the largest collections of points-of-interest (POI) data sets and now that library is available again on the iPhone. The usual suspects can be found on Layar, such as Flickr photos, Google search, YouTube videos and Wikipedia articles, but one of the more unique layers on the app is Foursquare integration.
Users can use the Layar AR viewfinder to find nearby Foursquare locations and by linking the app to their account can check in without leaving Layar. There is also a feature in each layer to view entries on a map, or in list view. The map is especially handy for Foursquare integration because Foursquare's own app disappointingly doesn't support a map view. An equally interesting layer to investigate is the Recovery.org layer which shows you which U.S. organizations in your area received funding (and the amount they received) from the Recovery Act.
"The new Layar Reality Browser has a re-engineered engine under the hood. This new engine makes the application light, stable and very quick," the company said on its blog. "It is ready to handle all the current layers and it is a good base to realize all of our exciting future plans."
Layar's return to the iPhone platform comes just in time for the company's new layer marketplace which will allow developers to charge users for their content; in other words, an App Store for mobile AR. If Subway wants to create a layer with all of their locations and charge $.99 for it's use, they or any other company will easily be able to do that. One could assume that Layar will make use of Apple's in-app purchase functionality on the iPhone, but it would be sad to see Layar lose a percentage of their cut on the purchases to Apple. If anything, that could raise prices on the layers themselves, but that's a whole other argument.
This could be a huge step forward for the mobile AR space. As these applications become more useful, more refined and more popular, companies will be excited to participate in providing branded content in an AR experience. Expect an announcement from Layar in the next few weeks about the launch of this exciting new platform, but in the meantime, iPhone users (3GS only) can go snag Layar's free app (iTunes link) in the App Store.
Your phone can translate foreign language text just by looking at it through Google Goggles. A South Korean telecom has released a product similar to Google Goggles. The social content Augmented Reality mobile browser junaio will have a new version released at SXSW next month and there's now an 8 minute video from TED available detailing Microsoft's plans for Bing, including Augmented Reality.
Augmented Reality (AR), the practice of displaying data on top of our view of the world around us, is hot stuff. Below are the top stories on AR from around the web over the past 24 hours, selected with help from OneSpot. Watch this space: ReadWriteWeb will be releasing a research report on the use of AR for marketing very soon.
"We've been able to translate languages with the help of Google Translate for a while now, but this new function within Google Goggles (which I'm already a big fan of) kind of blows my mind."
Metaio will present a whole new version of its social content mobile AR browser junaio at SXSW this year. The company's Unifeye Mobile SDK is also among the finalists of the "Accelerator" competition.
"Korean mobile network provider SK Telecom has revealed a new augmented reality application called Ovjet for Android-platform mobile phones. It seems like quite similar to the concept of Google Goggles. "
Short 8 minute TED Talk from Microsoft's Blaise Aguera y Arcas on the company's latest evolution of Bing Maps. Included an Augmented Reality demo. Here's the video.
At the 2006 Winter Olympics in Torino, Italy, digital advertising development studio Inition brought augmented reality (AR) to the games with a promotion they produced for Samsung which gave users a unique look at a new device from the company. With thousands of people flocking to Vancouver for this year's Olympics, the games have again taken to augmented reality for some unique and immersive marketing opportunities.
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Yahoo! and top AR development house Total Immersion have teamed up to provide an interactive information kiosk at the "Yahoo! Fancouver" exhibit. The experience involves a three paneled screen with sections for news, weather and medal counts, along with a camera pointed at the user. Depending on where the user is standing, the AR software will place various hats and accessories on their head; ie: a press hat for the news section, or hats with country logos on them for the medal count section. The weather section places various weather related accessories on the user, such as wool caps, visors, sunglasses, and goofy umbrella hats.
Vancouver-based social media blogger, author and speaker Shane Gibson snapped the video below demonstrating the interactive AR display which is located in Yaletown, a borough within the Canadian city.
The experience, which also supports some brochure tracking features, is an entertaining way to draw the attention of the event's attendees while also providing them with useful information about the games. Facial tracking is nothing new for Total Immersion, who provided similar services for a Transformers promotion that placed a robotic helmet on users' heads. Others AR developers have used facial tracking for applications as well, including metaio's hockey mask promotion at the Xcel Energy Center in Minneapolis, and FittingBox's "virtual mirror" for Ray Ban Sunglasses.
The thing I like about this example of facial tracking AR is that - like the Ray Ban promotion - it provides a practical service along with the entertaining and interactive aspect. Users aren't simply walking up to a screen an having a 2010 Olympics hat stuck on their head, much like the Transformers or hockey mask promotions. Yes, the hats and accessories are a bit silly, but the addition of news, weather and medal count information makes the use more practical. The AR draws the attention of passers-by with its fun and gimmicks, but rewards them with actual useful information to take with them. A user walks away knowing what countries lead the medal count and what the weather will be like based on the AR hats that were placed on them.
I wouldn't be surprised to see a hat manufacturer like NewEra take note of this promotion and provide an interactive way for potential customers to model their various hat styles with either an in-store kiosk or with an at-home web-based solution. Facial and body tracking is an excellent use of augmented reality for fashion retailers, as we have already seen applications for users to try on sun glasses, shoes, clothing, jewelry, make-up and hairstyles. Imagine the private dressing rooms at department stores being replaced by AR "virtual mirrors" for a faster, more social way to try on new outfits. The possibilities are endless, but what or who will be next?
In January, the Austria-based company Mobilizy updated the Android version of its mobile augmented reality browser Wikitude to include a new feature they dubbed "Worlds," which are similar to the layers found in the alternatively popular Layar AR browser. On Thursday Wikitude 2.0 for the iPhone (version 4 on Android) was released on the iTunes App Store, brining these new Worlds to the iPhone.
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Previously, Wikitude only served up geo-tagged Wikipedia articles, or content created on the Wikitude.me online service. With the addition of Worlds, users can now also browse locally for Twitter posts, Flickr photos and YouTube videos - the usual AR suspects. Also, local search points-of-interest (POI) are available through Google Local Search, CitySearch and Qype, but actual search functionality is not included.
This new verison of Wikitude also marks the browser's first commercial entries as users can find the nearest Startbucks, Walmart, Harley Davidson or BestBuy locations using the various World filters found on the applications new "Overview" home screen. Some of the Worlds, such as Last.fm events, Meetup Events and Outside.in content, are unique to Wikitude and are innovative inclusions for AR browsing.
First released for Android phones in October of 2008, Wikitude was the very first mobile augmented reality browser to hit the market. Since then Layar, acrossair and hundreds of other mobile AR apps have upped the ante in the mobile AR space, and the latest iteration of Wikitude is in direct response to this competition.
Wikitude's updated features follow a continuing trend in mobile AR to consolidate a group of applications into a single AR browser-like experience. Mobilizy previously produced the AR application C2 YouTube for the iPhone, but has moved that functionality into Wikitude.
Additionally, acrossair's AR browser now includes features like Twitter and Wikipedia entries, which were previously features in their own independent applications. French iPhone app development house Presselite, which made waves with its Metro Paris Subway app, and other transit applications, has since rolled its applications together into the Bionic Eye application. It's only a matter of time before these companies begin rolling games and entertainment, a growing AR sector, into their browsers for one-stop augmented reality experiences.
Mobilizy, Layar, acrossair, and Presselite now have comparable AR browsing applications with Tonchidot not far behind with its more social app, Sekai Camera, the most popular AR app in Japan. Competition is certainly a good thing when it comes to mobile AR, and the deal-breaker in the coming months and years for most users will likely be the commercial content found on the applications.
Which mobile AR application do you like best? Let us know what you think in the comments.
Here at ReadWriteWeb, we've discussed the use of third party APIs when building an integrated online product, highlighting the disadvantages such a decision could entail. One topic on the flip side of that is the question of whether providing an open public API versus a closed private one is in your product's best interest. Massively viral services like Twitter have rapidly expanded their capabilities and brand awareness by releasing an open API for third party developers to build on, but for companies in fledgeling industries, like mobile augmented reality, the API decision isn't as clear.
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Along with Mobilizy's Wikitude World Browser, Amsterdam-based company Layar was one of the first mobile AR browsers to market and has since become one of the strongest players in the space. Layar allows users to view geo-tagged points-of-interest (POI) in a 3D "heads-up" display using their mobile phone's camera. We've covered Layar's evolution since its debut last June and eventual launch on Android devices two months later. Since then Layar has released an iPhone version of their application, but due to random crashes the company has temporarily pulled it from the App Store until they can work out the bugs.
Layar has quickly become of the most popular mobile AR browsing applications across the globe thanks to its impressive set of features, but the company's choice to provide an open API may have been the decision which fueled them to success. Companies that wish to jump on the augmented reality bandwagon have several choices for getting their content on Layar quickly and easily. Layar provides documentation on its website for how to use and interpret their API, but those looking for an easier method of geo-data input can use any of a number of third party tools. Thanks in no small part to tools like buildAR, Muzar and Winvolve, Layar's database of geo-data has rapidly expanded to include over 300 content layers including anything from restaurants to Twitter results, to even the locations of nearby heart defibrillators.
On the opposite end the spectrum, the accrossair browser, a similar mobile AR browser available on the iPhone, has decided to keep its API private and helps with the input of geo-data themselves for companies that wish to participate on their platform. Instead of allowing anyone to upload location data onto their platform, acrossair has reached out to corporations like McDonalds and FedEx to provide them with their own POIs in their browser. The one disadvantage this places on their product is a significantly lower number of POI sets that a user can access. With just over a dozen different options, acrossair has a fraction of the curated POI sets that Layar does. Founder Chetan Damani says that while their closed API certainly limits the amount of data on their browser, it enhances the overall stability of the browser - a factor which may play heavily for the company as they expand beyond the iPhone to Android and Symbian devices.
"We are keeping [the API] closed right now because we will be in a period of evolution and multiple iteration," Damani told ReadWriteWeb. "We want to move to Android, and we want to make sure that the APIs are the right APIs and that they won't limit our development. We only get one opportunity to get this right."
Damani and acrossair are playing it safe until they are able to expand their presence to more platforms before opening their API - a step Damani says they do plan on taking. When acrossair moves their browser to Android, Symbian and possibly even Windows Mobile devices, having a closed API will make the transition much smoother. Opening the API after they set up shop on each mobile OS will be a lot easier without loads of independently developed geo-data on their system.
So is it better to limit one's API early on for the sake of stability while simultaneously hampering the possible reach of one's product? The acrossair browser seems to be taking that chance, while Layar, on the other hand, is welcoming third party developers with open arms. However, acrossair has one thing going for them that Layar currently doesn't - a working iPhone application.
How much of a role Layar's open API played in the demise of their iPhone application is unknown, but all that could be moot when Layar relaunches on the iPhone "by the end of February". However, if augmented reality is the supposed "future of web browsing" as some believe it to be, having closed browsing platforms is not a viable long-term solution.
"The hologram of a DNA spiral that I'm holding in my hand," your professor might say, "can be turned, twisted or expanded at-will and everyone on this video call will be able to see me do it." Is that the distant future of education, sales and casual communication online? Not if Augmented Reality company Zugara has its way.
The company announced today that it is working on fast and easy shared webcam Augmented Reality and its first prototype is already available.
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Though hundreds or thousands of Augmented Reality products hit the market last year and a handful have been widely seen - many people still doubt the utility of this technology. Zugara's approach seems to be one of the most clearly useful. If the company can pull-off making this kind of service fast, cheap and easy - we might find it in use in many different sectors. The webcam social shopper technology you see in the video is available now as a B2B service for apparel and shopping company partners.
Some AR proponents believe that in addition to the web browser and the mobile browser, the ability to view and interact with information placed on top of the world around us represents an important way that the internet will be interacted with in the future.
It's exciting to look forward to a web that lives between our eyes and the physical world. The AR industry faces challenges but it's one we're watching closely.
You're walking down the street. Your phone buzzes, a map or a screen overlay pops up and you're shown a note left in that location by one of your friends - along with an ad for your favorite pizza. Walk into the pizza place and your phone buzzes again - your friends have something to say about the guy behind the counter. That might have sounded far-fetched a few years ago, but it doesn't so much anymore, does it?
18 months ago Yahoo! filed a sophisticated patent on VIRTUAL NOTES IN A REALITY OVERLAY and that patent was published last week. Check out the patent sketches below.
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The technology envisioned by the team of senior researchers who filed the application is reminiscent of now-available apps like Loopt, BlockChalk, Junaio and others. The whole vision of location, social and advertising features put together, however, may be quite unique. The patent also goes beyond location to include notes tied to mobile objects like cars and people.
Update: This report at first mistakenly claimed that the patent in question had been granted. In fact it has merely been filed and published. The US Patent Office customarily publishes patents 18 months after they have been filed, then evaluates them as soon as it is able to afterwords. (Usually not very soon.) Given the pace of web technology these days, that process sounds absurd, but I apologize for reporting on it incorrectly anyway.
Yahoo's patent was filed in July of 2008, published after the customary 18 months last Thursday and first blogged about by upstart tech news site GoRumors this morning. The same team of inventors had another related patent application published at the end of last year on an augmented reality device that would discover audio, video and other information that's pertinent to a user's physical surroundings and display that information on a screen overlay.
The technology described in this latest patent isn't just location-based social networking, or Augmented Reality "air tagging" - it includes social graph analysis, permissioning, expiration dates, contextual advertising and more. It's not just text notes, it includes methods of augmented reality with photos, videos and more. While the most popular mobile augmented reality apps on the market today focus on text on top of locations - there's no reason why reality can't be augmented in other ways as well.
There's no indication that the technology exists yet outside of the patent application and sketches below, but if Yahoo! could put together such an integrated vision of location-based features then it would have a very interesting service on its hands.
This vision puts emphasis on limited visibility of public notes based on the social connections of people doing the reading and writing, on the use of the tool for communication between people more than for public graffiti, on notes tied to entities and not just to places and on advertising based on a reader's past expressed interests. That sounds like the kind of thing Facebook might do with its inevitably forthcoming location services.
Will anything come of this patent? It's hard to say, since it's Yahoo, where genius flowers but then too often gets left out in the cold to die. Just two months before this innovative patent was filed, were were heralding Yahoo's brand new Location Database API as a would-be fountain of location-aware apps. Almost two years later, though geo is hotter than ever, it seems that nothing much has come of that effort. (Please, correct me if I'm wrong about that.) Six months ago we ran an article titled Yahoo! Launches Major Challenge to Facebook Connect. That doesn't seem like such a hot topic anymore, either. We asked Yahoo! for comment this morning about this latest patent and haven't been put in touch with anyone yet.
None the less, these are some very interesting ideas. Someone is sure to build something like this very soon. Maybe it will be Yahoo.
Watch this space for ReadWriteWeb's next public event and future research reports on Augmented Reality and geolocation.
Are you ready for some augmented reality (AR) apps that aren't gimmicky and pointless? So is Qualcomm. The chipset maker released its AR software development kit (SDK) for Android last fall and is preparing to launch an iOS version next month, in addition to supporting Unity's game engine for cross-platform development.
When content management systems (CMS) like 
In December of last year, augmented reality (AR) browser makers 
Users can use the Layar AR viewfinder to find nearby Foursquare locations and by linking the app to their account can check in without leaving Layar. There is also a feature in each layer to view entries on a map, or in list view. The map is especially handy for Foursquare integration because Foursquare's own app disappointingly doesn't support a map view. An equally interesting layer to investigate is the 
Layar's return to the iPhone platform comes just in time for the company's 
Your phone can translate foreign language text just by looking at it through Google Goggles. A South Korean telecom has released a product similar to Google Goggles. The social content Augmented Reality mobile browser junaio will have a new version released at SXSW next month and there's now an 8 minute video from TED available detailing Microsoft's plans for Bing, including Augmented Reality.
At the 2006 Winter Olympics in Torino, Italy, digital advertising development studio Inition brought augmented reality (AR) to the games with 
The thing I like about this example of facial tracking AR is that - like the Ray Ban promotion - it provides a practical service along with the entertaining and interactive aspect. Users aren't simply walking up to a screen an having a 2010 Olympics hat stuck on their head, much like the Transformers or hockey mask promotions. Yes, the hats and accessories are a bit silly, but the addition of news, weather and medal count information makes the use more practical. The AR draws the attention of passers-by with its fun and gimmicks, but rewards them with actual useful information to take with them. A user walks away knowing what countries lead the medal count and what the weather will be like based on the AR hats that were placed on them.
In January, the Austria-based company 
First released for Android phones in October of 2008, Wikitude was the very first mobile augmented reality browser to hit the market. Since then 
Here at ReadWriteWeb, we've discussed
Along with 
On the opposite end the spectrum, the 
"The hologram of a DNA spiral that I'm holding in my hand," your professor might say, "can be turned, twisted or expanded at-will and everyone on this video call will be able to see me do it." Is that the distant future of education, sales and casual communication online? Not if Augmented Reality company 
You're walking down the street. Your phone buzzes, a map or a screen overlay pops up and you're shown a note left in that location by one of your friends - along with an ad for your favorite pizza. Walk into the pizza place and your phone buzzes again - your friends have something to say about the guy behind the counter. That might have sounded far-fetched a few years ago, but it doesn't so much anymore, does it?
Yahoo's patent was filed in July of 2008, published after the customary 18 months last Thursday and first blogged about by upstart tech news site