Augmented Reality

We're big fans of TED. This talk from Pranav Mistry at TEDIndia last November shows the potential of his "sixth sense" technology which links the physical and digital worlds. It got us on the hunt for more Augmented Reality. While perhaps not quite as impressive as Mistry's Sixth Sense, the following are available right now:

Layar: an Android app that overlays information onto your phone's screen when you point the camera at something.

We've posted about this before on this blog but Google Goggles is another Android app that pulls up data/extra info on something if you take a photo of it (an example shows review scores for a book, similar to the SixthSense demo).

Again, something we've blogged about previously but QR codes have been popular in Asia for a while but not really caught on here so much (although some magazines have used them in recent special "AR" issues). The Weather Channel in the US has started putting QR codes on-screen, so you can take a photo of it on your phone and it sends you to a page to download a weather app directly