Technology fans will be interested to know you can now see many blog posts from this local web site in augmented reality. We’ve been geo-tagging posts for a while (clicking on a map to insert the latitude and longitude into the HTML) and now you can see them on a map and in augmented reality (AR).
AR means that when you hold your phone up, the camera turns on and you can see blobs floating on the screen that represent blog posts about the place over which they are floating. The phone knows where it is, knows where the blog posts are and does the maths to put the blob in the camera display.
To see this download the Layar app on an iphone or android smart phone. Turn it on and go to ‘new layers’ and look for ‘hypARlocal apollo‘ – the working title of the project. You will need to be in the general Kings Cross/Holborn area to see London content. There have been some problems with Layar – if you get ‘no content available’ try again a few minutes later.
For the deeply tech-y Talk About Local are experimenting with AR technologies. They have built a web service which takes RSS feeds containing geo-tags (GEO-RSS feeds) and publishes them in Layar’s AR environment. The feeds then auto-update into the AR environment, providing a copy, paste, forget service to site owners. Posts in the AR world all click through to the original source page and provide a ‘take me there’ map feature. This makes it much, much easier to get stuff into a mobile AR environment. Read the kick off post for the project and see the project updates.
