TagWhat Social Augmented Reality Network

Posted on April 1, 2010 by thomaskcarpenter

Forgive me for posting this on April 1st. I feel like anything on the Internet is suspect today.

TagWhat looks to be a mixing of Foursquare, texting, and Yelp with a dash of augmented reality thrown in for good measure.  I’ll let the makers of TagWhat explain their product since I haven’t experienced it for myself:

Tagwhat is a new kind of social network focused on creating and distributing mobile augmented reality.

Mobile augmented reality, or AR, is a new way of displaying information in the mobile device, at the user’s location, over the live camera view of the mobile device.  Essentially, but placing data over real life, we ‘augment’ reality in ways that hopefully make your life richer.

In Tagwhat, we interact with maps to place text, urls, photos, or videos anywhere on the globe.  By following others in Tagwhat, users are able to merge the AR worlds of others’ with their own to form a completely unique social experience.

Beyond a status update or a location check-in, Tagwhat is a brand new way of reaching friends, communicating, socializing, delivering information, entertaining, and learning.  Tagwhat’s approach means higher quality interaction with brands, companies, customers, students, viewers, fans, and visitors.  The possibilities for you to discover and invent, meet and connect, are endless.

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Yelp introduces Augmented Reality to the iPhone via Easter Egg

Posted on August 27, 2009 by rouli

While I’m quite a skeptic whether Presslite’s Metro Paris application for the iPhone has “AR capabilities” in the version available on the appstore, there’s no denying Yelp’s application does.
Found by Robert Scoble (I’m pretty sure it was leaked to Scoble), and brought to my awareness my ReadWriteWeb, shaking your iPhone while on Yelp’s main menu three times, will open up an hidden feature named monocle. Monocle is nothing but an augmented reality view of Yelp’s listing, as shown in the next video (many thanks to Tom Carpenter for finding this one):

It only works on the iPhone 3gs, but unlike Metro Paris, it’s free, so don’t hesitate to tr y it out. Now, I don’t think that in the long run it matters whether Apple knew or not about this feature. Obviously, mobile augmented reality is here, and we are only about see more of it in the coming months. What should matter is what’s next? Where will innovation come from, if everyone is using the same compass and GPS combo?
I for one think that we are in the middle of the “AR browsers” season, but the next big thing, which better suits the technology at hand (imprecise compasses), is mobile AR games. What are your thoughts?

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