The augmented-reality program, known as Monocle, was built for Yelp by an industrious intern and originally hidden in Yelp’s app. (It was activated if you shook the iPhone three times.) Monocle is now a formal feature that combines the iPhone’s camera view with tiny tags indicating the names, distances, and user ratings of proximate bars, restaurants, and more. Poke a floating tag on the screen with your finger, and up pops detailed information about the business.
Among the other augmented reality programs that recently have hit Apple’s App Store is Robotvision, a 99-cent program built by Portland, Ore.-based developer Tim Sears.
If you hold your phone parallel to the ground, Robotvision displays a map of your surroundings. Hold the phone up, however, and it goes into augmented-reality mode, highlighting places like coffee shops and bars. Robotvision also can search for other kinds of businesses with Microsoft’s Bing search engine. You can view pictures that people took nearby and posted to Flickr with a “geotag” of the shot’s physical location. Or, you can see Twitter postings composed in the area.
Next, Sears plans to update the application with local content from Wikipedia.
An example of augmented reality’s potential for instruction can be found in the work of Massachusetts Institute of Technology Professor Eric Klopfer, author of “Augmented Learning: Research and Design of Mobile Educational Games” and director of MIT’s teacher-education program.
One recent mobile simulation designed by Klopfer and his colleagues is TimeLab, which starts with a video showing the future of Cambridge, Mass. (home of MIT), which has been devastated by global warming. Players are sent back to the present day to travel around the MIT campus and collect information they can use to reduce climate change and its effects on the city.
Blair MacIntyre, an associate professor who runs the Augmented Environments Lab at Georgia Tech, worries that the technological limitations these applications currently face will keep them from living up to what people imagine they can do. Similar disappointments followed early hype for virtual reality, a cousin of augmented reality in which the landscape is entirely computer generated.
Indeed, there are issues hindering today’s augmented reality applications. Cell phones need to be more powerful, with improved cameras and graphics capabilities and more accurate GPS. The technology can generally pinpoint location to within 30 feet if a user is outdoors.
The limitations mean locations you see on the screen are often not actually in front of you, though they are nearby. And tags sometimes just dart around on the screen, seemingly untethered to a physical place. Another problem: Using GPS for extended periods quickly sucks up the battery life on most phones.
Developers and industry watchers are optimistic, though, that in the next few years we might see everything from augmented reality video games to museum guide services that recognize paintings and can pull up videos showing the artist at work, or information on the artist’s life and times.
“Things are pretty cool right now,” Sears says, “but they’re definitely going to get better.”
Links:
Augmented Environments Lab at Georgia Tech
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