Augmented reality meets social networking

Although Augmented Reality (AR) sounds like something taken straight from a science fiction movie, it is rapidly becoming a part of our lives, especially on the go.
For those of you who haven’t experienced the handheld thrills of AR yet, permit me to explain. According to Wikipedia, the source of all modern knowledge, AR is a technology which provides “a live direct or indirect view of a physical real-world environment whose elements are augmented by virtual computer-generated imagery.”
What this means in human speak, is that people can use their handheld devices to capture images of the world around them – video or still life – and AR adds an extra layer of data on top of it in real time, viewable, clickable, searchable. It’s what the world would look like with the Internet on top of it.
As wacky as this all sounds, even big corporations are starting to see the uses for AR, with the likes of Coca cola, BMW, Nestle, and others already integrating the technology into their respective ad campaigns. Indeed, it allows for creative agencies to get a whole lot more creative in their client interaction, which has long been a holy grail.
Augmented Reality, however, can be so much more than playing with 3D creatures by filming a Nestle cereal packet on your handset. Indeed, with today’s smartphones boasting more powerful processors than ever before, high resolution cameras and GPS, the world is your virtual oyster.
Just take a company like Layar for example. This Dutch firm has created a browser for both the iPhone and Android platforms, with a Symbian version in the works. The Layar Reality Browser shows users what is around them by displaying real time digital information on top of the real world as seen through the camera of their smartphone.
Layar works using a combination of the mobile phone’s camera, compass and GPS data to identify the user’s location and field of view, retrieve data based on those geographical coordinates, and overlay that data over the camera view.
It’s better to understand in video format:
Now let us take another mobile, social phenomenon – location based applications like Gowalla and Fouresquare. These are currently seeing huge hype, with Fouresquare recently announcing that its usage has increased over 200% in the last month alone.
Twitter has already launched its own location based service, @anywhere, and Facebook too is about to jump on the bandwagon.
But a little Israeli company by the name of Msonar has done something particularly innovative by combining both location based apps and AR, coming up with a Facebook based AR browser.

With a tagline proclaiming “Your friends, around you!”  the browser enables users to add a facebook layer to reality, showing you if any of your friends are close by along with other AR options.

Using mSonar’s proprietary location services platform, Facebook AR can pinpoint your subscribed friends on a map, as well as telling you how far away they are from you and giving you information about your current location.

“We are already working on the next version of the application, which will bring with it a slew of new features and capabilities,” says mSonar, as it forges ahead with its AR plans.
The app, currently only available on iPhone, is free.
So it would appear that combined with the interest from big brands, the popularity of location based social apps and the ever growing smartphone market, this science fiction story is already a reality – an augmented one at that.