Needed: a camera-phone with GPS, compass and high bandwith internet. What it gets you: point your camera at a street, object or in a direction and the phone will tell you, through an overlay on the camera-image where the nearest ATM is or what the building is you are looking at. ‘Terminator vision’, it is called, relating to Governor Arnold’s success-movies. Chetan Damani, one of the founders of Acrossair talks about these Augmented Reality application with O’Reilly. He explains that we will first see a lot of ‘easy’ applications, like finding the nearest ATM, metro station, etc. However, when developers will take a bit more time, we will see the really interesting stuff appear, like seing what’s currently on sale in a certain shopping atreet or where the nearest good restaurant is with a table for four available. One of the drawbacks he notices is that the accuracy of GPS and compass are limited to 5-10 meters, so that your phone will be able to point you to the nearste clothing shop, but not tot the jeans department. Interesting developments to watch in the coming years.
