Two years ago a conceptual video came out of our research on the different input / output channels of a smartphone. It received some fuzz on the web and many people wondered if - and or how fast - it would be possible to achieve these kind of concepts on a mobile phone.

 

 

Today there is an Android Market, an App Store and big community of developers.
Funny how fast things change.

 

A few weeks ago I got in touch with Joachim Gelhaus. In one of his youtube videos he shows a working prototype with the following hardware setup:

While this isn't a mobile setup, it's interesting to see how Joachim technically solved the problem of augmenting a live feed of images easy and cheap.
For the geeks: his vector data which he uses to augment the maps are being fed through .osm files in XML format. Being a complete one-man project, this is quite an impressive achievement and pretty close to what is visualized in the AUGNAV concept:



On the other hand, there are also some noteworthy mobile achievements. Wikitude Drive is one of them. Based on the Wikitude software this application is able to provide a live feed of heading directions on the image. It was developed by Mobilizy Research & Development group in Salzburg, Austria to see if it was feasible to combine real time navigation with mobile augmented reality. A sound yes is what the app told us:




Finally there is Phyroa, a small startup focussing on development for Android. A few months ago they released a video showing their new app "AugSatNav". An almost one to one implementation of the conceptual AUGNAV video:

 

The visualizations and UX might not be too convincing, but these guys made the point by putting a working app out there. Big thumbs up.

 

It all shows never to worry about technology. It evolves very fast.