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during televised football games. Until recently, augmented reality was a mostly theoretical
idea, confined to laboratories where, no doubt, people used those big, clunky Lawnmower
Man helmets to try it out. But augmented reality isn't virtual reality. The world it shows us
isn't a new one: it's ours, only improved.
AndintheageofGPS-andcamera-enabledphones,youdon'tneedthehelmetanymore.
Imagine this: you walk out of a Manhattan office building and wonder where the closest
subway is. Instead of consulting a bird's-eye map, you just hold up your cell phone. The
screen shows your current point of view but augments it with a new layer of information:
as you rotate the phone, symbols appear, hovering in the air in front of you as if fixed in
place. There'sonefortheLexington AvenueLine, just325feet toyourright.Maybeadot-
ted pink trail appears onthe sidewalk to guide youdirectly to the nearest entrance, and you
have to look twice to be sure the trail's not there in real life. On the way, you notice that
userreviewsarefadingintoviewwhenyoupointyourphoneatrestaurants,andsightseeing
links accompany tourist attractions. When you angle the camera upward, the windows of
someoftheapartments acrossthestreethavevirtual FORRENT signswithpriceslisted.This
is all information you could glean from any number of digital maps, but there's a crucial
difference: for thousands of years, we mentally projected ourselves into maps; now map
information has the ability to project itself outward, onto us.
I'msoaccustomed totheendlessdisappointments offuturism(inayearthatbeginswith
a 2, why am I not living in a domed undersea city by now? ) that it comes as a shock when
I read that augmented-reality phone apps already exist—not in labs and at trade shows but
for reals: free in Apple's app store, even. I upgrade to a new iPhone just to try out some of
these tools but wind up disappointed. One called Wikitude promises to embed my environ-
ment with information about nearby POIs, like a Web browser for the real world, but when
Itryit outinfrontofmyhouse,all Isee are logosforevery Starbucks andBest Buywithin
five miles. Yelp's augmented-reality Monocle, the first AR app available for the iPhone, is
a little better, bringing up an accurate text box about my favorite Thai place when I hold
the phone up vertically and point it northwest, but neither program provides a very com-
pellingexperience.MyversionoftheAppleoperatingsystemdoesn'tallowthirdpartiesto
use incoming visual information, so these apps are trying to figure out what I'm looking at
based solely on readings from the camera's GPS device and accelerometer. Even if I make
slow, smooth phone movements, the AR data wiggles and jerks around unpredictably, des-
troying any illusion that it's painted over the real world. And a smart-phone screen is just
too small and dim to be very immersive. You end up squinting and thinking for a minute
and then saying, “Yeah, I guess that's kind of cool,” sort of like when you were looking at
those Magic Eye posters of dolphins back in the 1990s.
But these are temporary glitches; before long, no doubt, the imagery will be smoother
and we'll all be wearing Terminator contact lenses with built-in heads-up displays for all
the AR data. Not all the applications of augmented reality are map-related, of course. You
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