Terminator vision coming to a mobile device near you thanks to Augmented Reality

About a month ago I began researching something called Augmented Reality (AR). In the process I’ve gathered dozens of pages of notes and references and instead of publishing everything all at once with my point of view, I’ve decided to publish a series of AR articles for the savvy marketer looking to get a crash course on what I think is the future of digital marketing, gaming, communications, and life as we know it today

What is AR?

In a nut shell, it’s adding a layer of information on top of “reality” – or what your webcam or mobile camera is projecting on your screen.  Like a QR or 2d bar code, an AR 2d bar code is interpreted by your webcam but instead of being sent to a URL, data is layered on top of the AR code – creating an augmented reality. Check out this demo:

What is Mobile AR?

Take the above example and instead of creating a gaming or 3d layer on top of your mobile camera, imagine leveraging the GPS capabilities of your device to give you contextual information of where you are right now. This is where the Terminator vision comes in… except it’s on your phone. Imagine walking down the street of a new city and you are totally lost. Open up your Google maps and activate the AR mode an suddenly all the buildings around you are labeled.  Consumer ratings of restaurants float above signage. Now imagine going to a networking event and pointing your device to the room and people’s name and relation to you (relative to linkedin or some other social network) appears above their head.

Check out the video below which shows a real prototype of this application. Look for this to be the killer feature in the next release version of Android:

Enkin from Enkin on Vimeo.

But wait… there’s much more!

Recently Tom Purves gave a presentation on AR at a refresh event. Lucky for those of us who could not attend, Tom uploaded his awesome presentation to slideshare. Check it out below: