Augmented Reality Slowly Becoming a Reality

While it’s probably some time before Augmented Reality (AR) is part of everyday practice, it’s good to see that some applications are coming to fruition.  Today, Marshall Kirkpatrick at ReadWriteWeb posted that Metro Paris Subway (iTunes link), a French app from PresseLite has appeared in the iTunes store.  A commenter on Marshall’s post, Tim, speculates that Apple will take the app down because “there’s a Chromeless image picker the iPhoneARKit guys used that made it possible to do image overlays in 3.0, but it was rumored Apple was rejecting the majority of the apps that used it.”

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UMEnIRvAOoY[/youtube]

There are already several AR apps for Android phones as well as other demos for iPhone. ReadWriteWeb wrote yesterday about five key obstacles that Augmented Reality faces in becoming mainstream.

There’s also work in this area being done by Pattie Maes from MIT Media Lab’s Fluid Interfaces group.  See my post from February, Our Sixth Sense: Wearable Fluid Interfaces.