Apple’s revolutionary iPhone brings Augmented Reality to the world

“Augmented reality, or AR, is a succinct name for a phenomenon that’s beginning to make its mark on the world, and which some observers expect to be widespread in a decade,” Anthony Doesburg writes for The New Zealand Herald.

“AR does for the real world what VR, or virtual reality, did for the denizens of computer labs,” Doesburg writes. “Whereas VR created real-seeming realms that existed only in silicon, AR starts with the world around us, adding to it information specific to a particular location.”

Doesburg writes, “The devices that will bring AR to the masses are cellphones with built-in GPS receivers and digital compasses. So far there aren’t many such handsets available; the best-known is Apple’s newest iPhone, the 3GS and the HTC Hero, which uses Google’s Android software.”

MacDailyNews Take: And, the best-known physicists are Albert Einstein and Michael John Beavier.

Doesburg continues, “Pointing the camera down Paris’ Champs Elysees, with the precise location fixed by the GPS and compass, a service provider could overlay the names of landmarks visible in the camera image. Already, applications like Yelp and Wikitude do exactly that, to the excitement of the user community.”

Full article here.

21 Comments

  1. Provided the Camera image is tagged with the meta data. The iPhone does tag the image with the GPS location data including the direction the photo was taken in and on what spot it was taken from.

    Digital Camera Companies are Added GPS Chips to many Camera so in the near future all new cameras will tag images with the GPS Location information and with the direction information. Apple’s Own iPhoto and Aperture will use this data to group your images.

  2. You should change the title of this piece from “Apple’s revolutionary iPhone brings Augmented Reality to the world” to “Apple’s ‘revolutionary’ iPhone starts getting one or two Augmented Reality apps a year after Android phones brought them to the world.”

  3. Funny take MDN, and right on. I guarantee you I could stop ten people at random on the street and all ten would have heard of the iPhone and not one of them would have heard of the HTC Hero.

  4. This technology, while in its infancy, will be a game changer to the world of advertising. And thus will eventually annoy the $%#@ out of each of us.

    But it has a lot of cool potential.

  5. Apple didn’t ‘steal’ AR. Developers are simply writing AR apps that run on the iPhone 3GS. Writers note the iPhone because it is simply the most ubiquitous platform on which these apps run. If a tree falls in the forest, and know one is around, does it make a sound? Until these apps started showing up on the iPhone, AR wasn’t making much of a sound.

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