A couple of months ago while I was vacationing in St. Louis, I found myself wanting to try something different for dinner and had two options; either drive around an unfamiliar city and hope I found something interesting, or ditch my plans to be spontaneous.Since I didn't have a laptop with me in the car to search for a restaurant (and definitely did not trust my navigation skills), I had to settle for room service pizza and a pop from the vending machine.
But if I'd had one of the new augmented reality apps that are quickly gaining ground in the mobile smartphone industry, I may have had a few more options.
The general idea is that these augmented reality (AR) apps utilize your phone's camera, internal compass and GPS to change (or augment) what you see through the camera.
For example, you can aim your phone's camera at a street and apps like Layar or Yelp will show the names and reviews for the different buildings (or restaurants) on the screen.
And while the technology is obviously still being tweaked and perfected, more and more of these AR apps seem to be popping up for both iPhones and Android phones. These apps seem to be capable of everything from viewing Wikipedia entries for different tourist attractions to digitally shooting your friends and family with a machine gun.
Whether these AR apps are the future or just a fad has yet to be seen, but either way they are proving that smartphones are providing a ton of new opportunities for innovation.
Now if only I had a smartphone instead of my cracked, brick-of-a-phone from 6 years ago.