Augmented Reality Boosting Case For Smartphones

As if the trend for smaller devices wasn’t clear enough, a relatively new kind of software for smartphones (it was first demonstrated in late 2008) is going to make hand-held devices even hotter.

And with good reason. Augmented Reality (AR) may sound like an ominous sci-fi dystopia waiting to happen, but it’s actually a way of adding a layer of metadata to what your smartphone’s camera viewfinder shows you when you look through the lens.

Point an AR-equipped smartphone at a landscape, an apartment building or a tennis court, and you’ll be able to know how high that mountain, how big and expensive that apartment or the score on center court, thanks to a collaboration between software vendors like Layar or Mobilizy and partners like tourism boards, realtors, and Wimbeldon.

This technology is already in use in the Netherlands and the U.K. for commercial purposes, allowing users to see pricing and other information about houses viewed through their smartphones.

So far, the technology is only available in Europe, and only for phones running Google’s Android operating system. Joe Maglita says it’s a “potential game changer for medicine, design, entertainment, [and] service … [by] blending digital information atop physical reality.”

Here’s why it’s a potential game-changer: if you can use your smartphone to send email, write notes, edit documents and surf the web, and if on top of all that you can use its camera as a way of seeing the metadata of what surrounds you in real time — why would you carry around anything bigger?

Of course, AR still needs to overcome a few hurdles before we get to enjoy its benefits in the US:

• Apple needs to stop blocking apps it thinks might someday in the future compete with potential or likely products;

• Symbian and Windows Mobile also need to allow developers to create AR for their platforms; and

• U.S.-based developers have to see the long-term value of creating the metadata and serving it up — this doesn’t happen with the push of a button, but requires the participation of several players

As with network effects, the value of AR will increase as more people start using it.