Making Augmented Reality Browsers Even Better With Panoramic And Bird’s-Eye Zooming

One of the most exciting, gee-whiz features being developed for mobile phones right now are augmented reality browsers. Rather than fire up a mobile Web browser like Safari or Opera, these generally add an information layer over the world as seen through your phone's camera lens. Last year at TechCrunch50, Tonchidot's Sekai Camera wowed the crowd with its AR browser demo, Layar is creating a lot of buzz in Europe , and this summer AR technologies finally started to hit the market . You had Yelp sneak in an AR feature into its latest iPhone app, and a growing number of Android apps are embracing AR as well. We are at the very early stages of what may very well become a common interface for mobile browsing, which means that it is still very primitive. You can only click on buildings or objects within your immediate view. Daniel Wagner, a virtual reality researcher at Graz University of Technology in Austria, is proposing two ways to make AR browsing better: panoramic and bird's-eye zooming . TechCrunch50 Conference 2009 : September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco