Web 2 Ireland

Hugely impressed to hear the latest news from RateMyArea; they have created an augmented reality version using the the Layar Reality Browser which has been getting tons of attention in the tech press recently.

The idea behind augmented reality is that you look “through” your smartphone and it adds lots of contextual information to what you see based on your location and the direction you are pointing in. So for example a famous building will have Wikipedia information displayed.

Here’s a screenshot of the system in action:

Their layer covers over 110,000 POIs (Point of Interest) across 400 different categories in the following cities: Dublin, Galway, Belfast, London, Brighton & Hove, Cardiff, Oxford, Swansea, Bristol and Edinburgh.

At the moment it is only available on Android devices (Oi! Vodafone, O2, Three, Meteor, where are the bloody Android phones already?!) but will be on iPhone 3GS in September.

With Layar and Wikitude launching in quick succession on Android, it’s going to be an exciting 12 months in the world of location based services.

Tags: augmented reality, layar, ratemyarea, wikitude

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 27th, 2009 at 8:34 pm and is filed under Irish Web2.0 News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.