Augmented Reality Goes Mobile

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More Mobile Interest

In the past year, Metaio has worked with LEGO Group to install kiosks in several retail outlets that can help kids see what the LEGOs will look like once they're assembled. The company is also increasingly interested in developing mobile applications. On Nov. 2, Metaio released an iPhone app called Junaio that lets consumers see location-based content through the phone's camera and lets them easily add 3D images to photos. "From a development point of view, the strategy internally is now to develop for mobile platforms first," Alt says.

Total Immersion has done 3D simulation for companies such as Boeing, BMW, Peugot, and Renault. In September, Total Immersion signed an exclusive distribution partnership with int13, a French software firm that specializes in next-generation smartphone applications. The aim is to create apps that integrate real-time interactive 3D graphics into a live video stream. The first application will be developed for Symbian and Microsoft (MSFT) Windows Mobile devices, with iPhone and Android support following.

Developers are also working on another kind of mobile augmented reality application: AR browsers, such as SPRXmobile's Layar and Mobilizy's Wikitude, which essentially pick up geo-tagged content such as information from Wikipedia or, say, real estate listings. The risk with browsers is that it's easy to be inundated with tagged information, and it might be difficult to wade through the information. "The advantage of the Layar browser is that it lets you do filtering by picking which layer of reality you want to see," says software developer William Hurley, who goes by the name Whurley. The Layar browser, which was first released for Android devices in June and the iPhone in October, has 176 so-called layers in categories ranging from real estate, health care, and transportation to entertainment, tourism, and social networks. Yet Whurley says there will be a general need for content-management tools to simplify the AR experience.

Singley at Yelp says the company has more improvements in the works. It is planning another release of its application for the iPhone by the end of the year. "As iPhone technology gets better, augmented reality will get better too," he says.

King is a writer for BusinessWeek.com in San Francisco.

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