Augmented reality on mobile phones

Despite the science-fiction-sounding name, augmented reality is just a way to combine the real world with computer-generated information.

In many recent science fiction films there are scenes in which a character will conjure up computer-generated information out of thin air­ – think Tom Cruise in Minority Report or the computer-aided vision of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Terminator in the Terminator series of films.

More realistically, though, it can be made practical by the use of the camera in your mobile phone. One of the first applications to become available was the Wikitude World Browser, which works on phones that use the Google Android operating system, such as the T-Mobile G1.

When the phone’s camera is running and pointed at a street, the application adds information about real-world points of interest such as nearby landmarks, hotels, shops, banks and services by adding their logo.

Users who want to get to the landmark can walk in the direction of the logo and the phone’s display will update to keep up with their movement. The thinking is that this provides a more useful way to navigate, especially for people who do not get along with conventional maps; instead of having to follow the representation of the local streets on such a map, the user can simply look up and follow their phone.

A similar application is Layar, also for Android phones, which overlays all sorts of information over the phone’s camera display such as London Underground stations.

While this technology exists now, it’s not available to everyone. For this scenario to work, the user’s phone needs to have a camera to show the images, a GPS navigation sensor to tell the application where in the world the user is, and a compass that tells it the direction in which the phone is pointing.

The last of those, the compass, is crucial, and without it the application is useless: while it can tell you where you are, without the compass it can’t know where on the screen to put the logos of the nearby businesses.

At the moment, there are only a few handsets that have all three required elements: the T-Mobile Google G1, the iPhone 3GS (the latest and most expensive edition of the iPhone) and some models from Nokia.

There are less intensive applications that do something similar but don’t require the use of the compass or the location-tracking. They tend to be less useful, too, however. In fact, most such applications are games that, while diverting, tend to be of limited use and more of a distraction than a useful tool.

For instance, the game Fairy Trails overlays the phone’s camera display with computer-generated fairies, which the user has to ‘catch’ and put in a jar by tapping them when they appear on the screen. The appeal of this, as opposed to a standard game, is that people can play it in their gardens or in the park, playing from locations in the real world.