It was my first time in France. Sightseeing, picnic in the park, heading out, chugging a bottle of sangria under the romantically lit river bridge.. it made me think life was so good, I could taste it in my spit.
The next generation of high-end mobile phones have a few things in common:
Camera
GPS
Fast processor
Fast internet connection
So I was discussing earlier this week with two of my colleagues how all this could be used in future mobile applications. We ended up thinking about a augmented reality navigation concept (and named it AUGNAV to keep things easy) which could look like this:
The camera could be used for input footage on which the phone augments a layer with virtual navigation information while driving. It would be capable of doing pattern recognition to detect road signs and correctly display the navigation path live on the footage.
Usually addresses are in a brochure or other printed media, so applications that could read those with OCR (text recognition) software by just taking a snapshot would be a convenient feature.
Same thing for surfing the mobile web: just like Skype recognizes phone numbers on websites, we think it's fairly easy to come up with software that is able to spot addresses on contact pages and provide an instant touch-to-navigate button:
University website with software rendered navigation button
Technically the live image pattern recognition and augmentation would be a bit too much for current mobile processors; but our guess is that will just be a matter of time.
We documented the ideas and limitations in detail within a scientific paper owned by the University for exploring research purposes. Available on request for interested developers.
