Nearest Tube, an augmented reality app for London's underground. (presselite.com)
The only force equal to the pace of innovation is our ability to become blasé about it. The first time a little box on my rental car's dashboard talked to a geosynchronous satellite and then told me where to turn left, I was amazed. Now the GPS lady mostly annoys me. When Hulu debuted, all perfect and polished, I was ecstatic that two stodgy networks finally got how my generation wants to watch TV. Now I get impatient when the newest 30 Rock isn't uploaded right away. Our socks get knocked off, and we put them right back on.
I predict that the latest jaw-dropper in technology, though, has some staying power. I've been showing some early examples to my seen-it-all friends, and they've been nothing less than blown away. The first time I saw a video demonstration, in fact, I thought it had to be a fake: we live in modern times, but there's no way that's real!
I'm talking about "augmented reality"—and you might have a device capable of it in your pocket right now. Remember those scenes in the Terminator movies that showed us what the world looked like through Arnold Schwarzenegger's cyborg eyes? Shapes and individuals were recognized and tracked, with a layer of information superimposed on top.
Augmented-reality apps for the iPhone 3GS and some Android handsets can now do essentially the same thing, thanks to a few key components. Because of GPS, these devices know where you are. And because of accelerometers and built-in compasses, they know where you're pointing. Add an Internet connection, and augmented-reality apps can start describing what you're looking at in real time.
AR apps are so new, only a few yet exist. One of the best I've seen is Sky Map, created by Google in May, way ahead of its time. It's spectacular. Point it at the night sky, and Sky Map labels every star, planet, and constellation. Or you can search for something celestial, like Auriga the Charioteer, and the app will tell you where to angle your Android phone until you're looking straight at it. (A similar app called Pocket Universe, good if less polished, is available for the iPhone.)
Just in the last month, augmented-reality apps have begun appearing in the iPhone App Store with regularity. As is common with brand-new technology, many are buggy and basic. New York Nearest Subway, for example, is more useful for showing friends what augmented reality can do than it is useful in and of itself. Outside NEWSWEEK's downtown offices, this app helpfully superimposed icons for the nearby 1 train over the real-time view from my iPhone's camera—but it also told me about a station on Staten Island, seven wet miles away. (My guess—based on the early availability of similar apps for Paris, London, Chicago, Tokyo, and other cities—is that these apps are the simplest to code.) More impressive offerings include Peaks, for identifying mountains, and Yelp, which hid a secret AR mode inside its standard iPhone app.
As the technology develops, augmented reality is popping up outside of mobile-device app stores, too. The U.S. Postal Service has a Virtual Box Simulator that helps you decide if a given package will fit in one of its flat-rate boxes. And the Lego store in downtown Orlando has a mesmerizing AR kiosk that tells kids what's inside each toy box—it's sure to empty a few parents' wallets.
The mind fairly boggles at all the different things AR could do. A supervisor at a port could use an AR screen to call up the manifest on a docking ship. At a basketball game, a fan could point her iPhone at the action to see live stats beneath each player. It's pretty tough to think of an arena that couldn't be transformed by devices with this capability. Let's just hope they all lead to more benevolent ends than that Terminator guy.
