45º views act as a transition between the standard top-down view and Google's new Google MapsGL, a full-3D Maps experience powered by WebGL in the browser. That part won't work on certain low-end graphics cards, but for those who can run it, Google Maps gets pretty magical. Google has good reason to push the envelope on 3D maps. Its competitors are working on magical maps of their own.

In addition to the full-3D WebGL views, desktop Google Maps also got a flyover feature for travel routes last year. When you put in travel directions, the map viewer gets a "Play" button that switches to a Google Earth 3D view and flies you from point A to point B. It's not the most useful feature in the world, but it's a nice way to check out the terrain on your route.

Google is even taking 3D mapping indoors. It's sending people with backpack-mounted Street View cameras inside local businesses, so Google can put a panoramic interior view into Google Places results. Google is also building mobile 2D maps inside buildings, including malls, airports, hotels and convention centers. When all these maps combine, Google can take you from a desktop or mobile search, down the street, into the mall, to the store, inside the store, and eventually, it wants to be the way you pay, too.

Sounds like Google has this whole business locked up, right? Well, let's not get ahead of ourselves. Google has competitors to worry about. There's Microsoft, whose Bing Maps got interior mapping first, but it's still a distant second in terms of market share. Amazon may not have the maps, but it has unparalleled reach into shopping. And Apple has Siri, a mobile assistant that already routes around Google when able, and it has made some intriguing mapping acquisitions.

The missing piece in Google's end-to-end mobile shopping chain is the shopping part, and no Web company does shopping like Amazon. Amazon has released an augmented reality iPhone app that lets customers scan products in a store and buy them (or cheaper alternatives) on Amazon. That's a pretty serious diss to local businesses, but it makes Amazon customers happy. Also, if they're buying through Amazon Flow, they aren't paying with Google Wallet. Amazon also bought a voice recognition company last year, sparking comparisons to Apple's Siri.

For Apple's part, Siri is the piece that threatens Google. Currently, Siri searches the Web using Google when it can't find the answer itself. Apple's iOS Maps app also uses Google for now. But certain features of the Siri beta are telling. When you use Siri to search for a local business, it uses Yelp, not Google. What can we expect from later versions of Siri and iOS? Here's a hint: In November 2011, Apple bought C3 Technologies, a 3D street view and interior mapping company.

What apps, maps and Web services do you use to find your way around?

Would you look at the world through Google Glasses? If you did, what would you see? That may be an option soon, if a reliable report today that the company is in "late prototype stages" on just such a product, proves accurate.

The Wow factor is clear - but what would fashionable cloud (connected) glasses really mean? How might they change what it means to be human and to live in this world? Make no mistake, they certainly could have a deep impact for those who wear them - and possibly for those who are seen through them as well. There's no better time than now to begin considering it all. The best way to start is to recognize those who have already begun before us; in this case science fiction author Vernor Vinge is a key source of illumination.

Hints and Clues

Hot in the news today is a report from Nick Bilton of the New York Times that Google is developing wearable computers in the secret Google X Lab that Bilton wrote about last month. That prompted Google specialist Seth Weintraub, now at Fortune and formerly of Computerworld, to call the news "an open secret among some in the Google community."

Weintraub asserts the following based on his previous reporting and one unnamed source he cites today:

[Google is] "in late prototype stages of wearable glasses that look similar to thick-rimmed glasses that 'normal people' wear. However, these provide a display with a heads up computer interface. There are a few buttons on the arms of the glasses, but otherwise, they could be mistaken for normal glasses.

"...In addition, we have heard that this device is not an 'Android peripheral' as the NYT stated. According to our source, it communicates directly with the Cloud over IP.

"...We do not have a release date for this new device, but we know that Google Co-founder Sergey Brin is closely associated with the project and it will be Google-branded hardware."

From battery power to proper contextual understanding of a user's location to price to form factor - there are a lot of problems that Google is going to have to solve beyond the imagery and signal reception. Cellular devices are now so small and so cheap that connectivity is probably one of the easier problems the secret team is working on.

What Could it Mean?

The how-and-wow is certainly interesting, but questions of use cases and implications are important too.

Sci-fi authors and artists have been talking about this future for years.

New media choreographer Johannes Birringer has said he looks forward to a future where cloud glasses can be used in art "to enhance and enrich the performer and audience experience with the media."

Mike Kuniavsky, co-founder of smart connected device design firm ThingM, invokes science fiction writer Vernor Vinge's ideas when it comes to widespread Heads Up Displays:

"I think that [Vinge's] idea of consensual imaging among belief circles is interesting. I consider it a kind of physical manifestation of software skinning, mixed with ideas shared among members of a social-network (as a blogroll is, for example).

The implications of this both excite and scare me: it would be totally cool to overlay a trusted source's view of a given scene on mine, but I feel people already ignore the complexity of reality too much and tend to live on parallel planes that exclude ideas that challenge theirs.

I don't want Orrin Hatch's world skin (though I'd try it on to see what it looks like), and I don't think he wants mine."

Architect and urban futurist Dr. Cindy Frewen Wuellner references Vinge as well in imagining how devices like this could change the way people experience the cities they traverse.

"The social city..where IRL [In Real Life] meets virtual, means people/you are the manipulators. The dumb city gets smart and social. The explosion of mobile phones brings the internet into the streets.

"Augmented realities give maps, twitter, sensors, and layers of information. It's transformational. NYC phantom city tour, don't miss that. Heads up display like Vinge's Rainbows End. For architecture and cities, the implications are huge."

Urban Futures, Language of #Architecture: How will you change 21st c #cities?

Artist and mobile technologist Julian Bleecker riffs on Vinge's talk five years ago at the Austin Game Conference.

Bleecker imagines a truly meaningful augmentation of reality...

Ways of revealing the linkages between 1st Life actions and consequences can be made sensible in ways that have been previously impossible.

New forms of networked interaction, participation & engagement that are not just about lightweight atoms & bits, RSS, and WoW raids, but about heavyweight action, the consequences of supra-atomic activities such as driving cars that are too big.

If I could have a heads up display akin to what WoW heavyweights have, but indicative of the relationships amongst a whole matrix of parameters that relate to my 1st Life actions..now that would be really significant."

In other words, Bleecker imagines the Cloud Glasses not displaying imaginary visions - but making things that have always been real, visible.

It's hard to imagine a more valiant calling for Augmented Reality than that.

No doubt most people will use their Google Cloud Glasses to play Angry Birds in an empty room (better that than Farmville!), or will wear them while wearing nothing else, but that's not the reason why any of these technologies are built and they don't represent any kind of limit to what's possible.

You may not want to visit StopHumanTraffic.com with your Cloud Glasses and your location turned on, but there are a whole lot of things good and bad that go on in the very same streets we all walk down every day that we don't see.

We may see the price of speed and altitude-displaying Heads Up Ski Goggles drop over time and it's not hard to imagine tourists wearing glasses given to them by visitors bureaus in major cities around the world.

But a SOPA'd future could also prohibit looking at copyrighted materials through your Cloud Glasses. There might have to be a splintered web that Cloud Glasses tie into in order to view things outside official channels. What would be on each side of that line? It's provocative to consider. Here comes the future, ready or not.

Flow can show shoppers Amazon's reviews and ratings as they're holding a product in their hands. It also has Facebook and Twitter sharing options. Of course, users can also opt to buy the product from Amazon, even though they're holding it in their hands. The free app is available on the iTunes Store.

The free app is right on time for the holiday season. But how likely are users to buy a product on Amazon when they're holding it in their hands? That probably depends on Amazon's price.

Earlier Rumors

Some sites speculated earlier that Amazon Flow was a media syncing service to compete with Apple's iCloud. This was based on a report from Fusible extrapolating from Amazon's trademark application for Amazon Flow.

That would make a great headline, but it's incorrect. Apple and Amazon have bumped heads often over delivery of media to devices, first with the Kindle app for iOS and recently with Amazon's Cloud Drive music locker. But Amazon Flow turns out to be an AR shopping app, well within Amazon's wheelhouse.

Do you use any augmented reality apps on your phone? What do you use them for?

The mobile app allows users to create, view as overlays on their mobile camera viewer and discuss Points of Interest regarding environmental problems and solutions around the city. The app can also be pointed at Green Party billboards, which will trigger the launch of a mobile video message from party candidates discussing the issues depicted on the billboards, but in greater depth. Check out the videos below, I think this is one of the coolest uses of Augmented Reality I've seen yet.

Isn't this the kind of thing we always imagined AR doing? Metaio says that Augmented Reality has been discussed most widely of late within a utilitarian context, for use in "industry uses, such as improving mechanical safety inspections, interactive training procedures, mobile instruction manuals, and assembly-line safety." The company points to additional examples of adoption in art and now politics as well, though.

But with the technology Google has licensed from SRI, image stabilization will no longer be a concern ... at least on Android. Google is implementing the SRI tech in its Google Talk application, to deliver better video on Android 3.0+ devices. And that may be only the beginning of Google's computer vision plans.

Image stabilization technology is over 20 years old, with initial applications built for defense use by DARPA. The technology was crucial to autonomous or semi-autonomous vehicles and robotics. Someone driving a tank, for example, would get nauseous in 2 minutes if it weren't for stabilization technologies, Winarsky says.

But these days, the tech has made its way into more benign, consumer-facing efforts, like Google Talk, apparently. Here, the video chatting application captures the video from a device's front-facing camera and compresses the data before transmission. In the compression algorithms, the amount of bandwidth used increases with the amount of motion in a scene.

By stabilizing the video, SRI's software allows the compression to take up fewer bits. Simply put, it's more efficient. It takes less work and fewer resources.

What Could Google Do, Post-Video Stabilization?

Although SRI can't talk for Google or about its future plans in this area, saying only that it "fully hopes to work beyond this app with Google," Winarsky was happy to talk in more general terms about where computer vision technologies are headed.

Once you have the stabilization down, he says, you can then work on things like tracking objects that appear in the frame, tracking the motion of objects and recognizing those objects. Head tracking, for example, was demonstrated at this year's Google I/O where the stabilization technology was used in conjunction with a face-tracking API (application programming interface) that will arrive in a future version of Google's mobile operating system Android.

Put it all together - stabilization, image tracking and image recognition - and you have "augmented reality" (AR), a term that describes technology that lets your device "see" the world in front of its camera lens and then act on that data in some way.

Google, of course, is already experimenting with AR to some extent through its "Google Goggles" application which lets you use pictures to search the Web. Google Goggles can currently identify things like landmarks, books, art, wine and logos, but has recently started recognizing text, too, in order to perform on-the-fly translations between languages.

Facial Recognition in Video?

There are other things that stabilization can help to enable, says Winarsky. For example, facial recognition. Until an image is stabilized, such a thing would not be possible on video. After stabilization though, the same type of algorithms that currently work on still images could be applied to moving video.

Google already uses facial recognition in its online photo-sharing service Picasa (soon to be rebranded as "Google Photos"), so it's not a big leap to assume that Google could introduce something like that to its video applications and services someday. Facial recognition in Google Talk? YouTube? Google Goggles? Who knows?

Case in point: earlier this year, Google denied that it has a facial recognition app in development, after CNN published a report to the contrary, including an on-record statement from a Google employee confirming its existence.  And Google recently rolled out a smart update to search that allows you to search for things using only an image. And guess what? It works for images of people, too.

So why not make people chatting with you on video, seen through your camera lens or those appearing in online videos "Googleable" objects? There's only one reason not to: it's a little creepy. But creepy/awesome is the line Google likes to toe. For the company, it's not a matter of if something is possible - it's only a matter of when is the right time to release it.

Stabilization, on its own, may seem like minor news, but it's an important first step towards a future where the world itself, and all the people in it, are things you can Google just by looking at them.

There are two versions of the app, the free + version and a paid Pro version for 99 cents that removes ads (mostly for their own products) from popping up on screen. It works with all iOS phones from the 3GS onwards and on v2 iPads (although not in full screen version on the latter, sadly).

The good people at the Portland Art Museum in Oregon found themselves in just such a situation and have leveraged an interesting new mobile publishing platform in order to capture some of the value of place-based digital content in order to share it with their patrons.

The new Portland Art Museum iPhone app is built on top of a platform called Meridian, by a company called Spotlight Mobile. The platform provides content and venue owners a super-simple graphic user interface to upload digital assets, input text and other information and then click to associate those assets with a very particular place in a particular room on a map.

While publishing, users are encouraged to recite with a dramatic flair and a magician's voice the words, "art history, from around the world...get into this phone!" (Just kidding - but it is something magical, is it not?)

As you might imagine, the app lets you select your location or key in an exhibit number and then enjoy the digital assets on your phone, in some cases a video or audio lecture about a particular piece of art - in other cases simply more text content than is displayed off-line. The museum will roll out a new section of the app for the historic auto show beginning today. Spotlight says that Android versions of its apps will be launching in the coming weeks.

A user's location isn't automatically detected in this app, though Spotlight Mobile says that it does just that at the American Natural History Museum in New York through a technology partnership with CISCO.

In addition to media assets, the app also offers maps and will soon offer dynamic directions to get from one part of a venue to another.

The best part of all this of course is the Content Management System. Just as blogging democratized the world of text publishing beyond the technical elite who practiced it first online, and sites like Flickr and YouTube made media publishing easy - Meridian falls into the same class of technologies by making it drop-dead simple for anyone to publish their content in an app format and tie it to very specific places. That's very cool.

The question this raises, then, is: so how much content can I as a patron get about the art I'm standing in front of? Unfortunately, in the case of the Portland Art Museum - not very much. Art snobs often turn their nose up at the Portland collection (I live in Portland and think they are wrong - I like it quite a bit) but this technology snob (?) has to say that the mobile offering is far too sparse today. If the dream is of standing in front of any piece in the museum and learning more about it, of peeking through your phone into another dimension where the art's history and context stand clearly visible around it - that remains a dream for now. How many pieces in the Portland Art Museum's permanent collection have media available on this app? I hesitate to even say it explicitly, but it's...eleven. Ouch.

Of course anyone else who's jumped into the new world of democratized publishing online knows that when it's said these technologies make it easy - that just means it's easy to click a button and have content go live. That doesn't make it any easier to find the time, inspiration and skill to actually produce the content that will then be published.

I used to stand in front of works of art at the museum and suspect that the museum itself had a whole treasure trove of additional information about what I was looking at, beyond what was posted on the wall. Now I'm not so sure. Maybe they do and it's just not in a friendly format.

The end result is an experience that's promising but for now a little disappointing. Hopefully a lot more content will be created and published over time. I suspect there is a lot more information about much of this art out on the internet - perhaps if there was a way to efficiently vet and build on it then all of this would be made easier.

Such is one of the key challenges of our time, though. Now that anyone can publish - what will you say? How will you do it? Placing that challenge of media transformation and newfound ease in the context of mobile and specific location, especially for venerable institutions like art museums, is a very interesting prospect.

But Jay Wright, Senior Director of Business Development for Qualcomm, says criticism that AR has, so far, produced no "real world apps" are valid. He also told us he's working with two big-name retailers to put out some of the first truly useful apps leveraging the technology - instruction manuals served up as AR-enabled mobile applications. These apps will show you, as opposed to telling you, how to perform complicated tasks.

The reason why we haven't seen these sorts of more practical implementations of AR technology has to do with how relatively new the developer tools are. The version of Qualcomm's SDK that allows for the development of AR apps for iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad, hasn't even been released yet, for example.

To be clear, there are many AR applications in mobile app stores today, including iTunes. But Qualcomm's implementation is technically different. It's offering "vision-based" AR, a computationally intensive type of AR (optimized for Qualcomm chipsets, of course) that turns the phone's camera into an eye that actually "sees" the world in front of it.

This is different technology than is found in most of the current AR apps, which typically use the phone's sensors, like the GPS and compass, to determine where you are and what you're seeing. Qualcomm's vision-based AR process involves scanning the camera frames, looking for objects, comparing those objects to a database, determining the position of those objects and then rendering animations or other digital content on top of them. At present, the database is stored in the app itself (the developer creates a limited database for use with their mobile app), but in the future, a "cloud" database will be available, meaning one stored outside the app, and accessed over the network.

Currently, Games and Gimmicks Dominate AR

As AR emerges, we're first seeing only gaming, play-oriented and advertising-based demonstrations and use cases for the technology. For instance, Qualcomm showcased several games that involve pointing your camera at inanimate objects to see characters appears on virtual gameboards. It also heavily promoted the Dallas Mavericks' implementation of AR which involved pointing your phone at a ticket or playbill to see a simple basketball-shooter game appear. Another demo, this one at yesterday's Uplinq 2011 keynote, showed DVD covers turned into movie trailers you could watch through your phone.

Future AR Use Cases

However, there are several still unexplored areas for AR's use. Visual search, for example, is one. Although there are companies, including Google and Microsoft, that offer visual search today, the process involves pointing your camera at a particular object which is then recognized and compared to an online database. AR-based visual search would be a smoother, more continuous experience, where the phone could move around and see several objects at once.

Another future use case would be the development of AR browsers, similar to the ones we have today, but that offer a better experience because of their improved alignment capabilities.

A third example would be using AR with print material, such as an ad in a magazine. Imagine a model wearing white pants, but the pants also came in three other colors. You could point your phone at the page, tap a colored box, and the pants change color. You could even turn the model around to see the back, or zoom in close to see the stitching. It would be like having an online experience with an offline medium.

But perhaps the most exciting future use case for AR is the most practical - and one that harkens back to AR's roots in aircraft assembly: virtual instruction manuals. You could point your phone at an object, like the buttons on a washing machine, a piece of computer equipment, an unassembled box of furniture parts, and be shown what to do.

When Will the Practical AR Apps Arrive?

Those apps are closer than you think. Wright says we'll see the first of these appearing this fall, in fact. He's currently in talks with two big-name retailers who will soon release mobile app instruction manuals, one of which will show how to put the ink in your printer - a task which, as anyone knows, is often more complicated and confusing than it should be.

Once people see more of these real-world examples of "practical" AR, users' perceptions may change. AR itself is not gimmicky, it's just that the way it's been implemented so far often has been.

Video credit: Mobile Industry Review

RWW: When was the first time you really thought you were going to go into augmented reality? Has that always been something for you?

Lens-FitzGerald: I never thought of going into augmented reality, but cyberspace, any form of digital worlds, have always been one of the things I've been thinking about since I found out about science fiction. One of the first books I read of the cyber punk genre was Bruce Sterling's "Mirror Shades." Mirror shades, meaning, of course, AR goggles. And that book came out in 1988 and ever since, this was my world.

In Verner Vinge's "Rainbow's End", he talks about somebody standing on top of a hill and he's flipping through all these versions of his ARs, or his realities, and that's literally where the name "Layar" came from - we knew that layers were the Web page metaphor for augmented reality. The other side of inspiration early came from Denno Coil. It's a Japanese anime that uses augmented reality in a great way that really is a near future scenario of what is about to come.

RWW: How do you define augmented reality? What's the simple definition?

Lens-FitzGerald: Reality enhanced with digital information, preferably immersive.

RWW: How far off from better image recognition are we are?

Lens-FitzGerald: I think this year, functionally, you'll see everyone coming out with image recognition one way or another. And then the years after that - 2012 and 2013 - you'll really get the big object recognition going. I think the key is not really the technology but what people do with content. I always say, "It's the format that's important."

The first time you guys in the U.S. ever had a TV on, it was a guy in front of a curtain doing a radio show and that was the TV show. Moving from there to American Idol, that's what it's about. It's about finding the right content. And of course you need more than one channel, you need a good remote and eventually color and stereo and HD. Technology will grow as it always does but it's more about finding the right content and format to have the people be engaged.

The good thing about a QR code is that it's sort of a call to action, although I don't have any incentive on average to point my phone at a QR code because I expect to be advertised to. One of the problems for augmented reality with a phone is, "When do I decide to point my phone at something to see if something is there?"

That's the million dollar question. That will be when your mom knows, and that will be because she [sees] some kind of benefit, fun, interestingness - and again there I'm talking content over format. Yes, it's around functionality, but there's something she has to like. That's when it crosses the chasm from a nerd thing. I think we're so much in the beginning. It's about timing and it's about pace, but we'll get there eventually. It's very early days.

RWW: At what point in the grand evolution of augmented reality are we right now? What's the next step? Is it hardware, software, both or none of the above?

Lens-FitzGerald: Suburban people - if Facebook somehow found a way to their life then we'll find a way too. We're not there yet, but that's where it'll go and right now, augmented reality, how many users would you guess it would have? Maybe a million, a million and a half? Layar has a million and a half active users in the last month and we're the biggest, so hardly anybody knows about it yet but it's getting there.

RWW: You're going to be speaking about "Lessons from building a digital layer on top of the world." What is that going to be about? What type of lessons are you talking about?

Lens-FitzGerald: We have thousands of developers - people creating cool AR content - and millions of users and I'll be going through some examples of what we see, what works, what categories we see that work, but I think most important is what we see happening right now.

That's what we call the democratization of augmented reality, meaning, it was very difficult a year and a half ago to make augmented reality. You had to be able to program. You preferably had to know how to do 3D and then you also had to be able to tell a story with that. All of that is pretty difficult. Not everybody can do that. What we see now is that more and more tools are being developed on top of our platform with which it is easier to make augmented reality, or even better it's cheaper.

I'm not a programmer myself. I recently made my own layer about the neighborhood and the water tower that disappeared in 1920. I put it back in 3D and I can do that because there are tools for that. That's a trend. If you think about TV again, TV was the domain of the big producers, the big networks in the U.S., until you started seeing video cameras. Video cameras slowly turned into YouTube.

That is, in the end, the way that augmented reality is heading. It's going from the heavy duty people who can do a lot to everybody augmenting anything they want. Imagine that. I think that's where it's heading somehow. You can create the world that you want and I can create the world that I want.

Lens-FitzGerald: I wouldn't call it information, because that makes it sound boring. It's not just ATMs. It's history, it's me being able to look back in time, it's 3D so you can see the Berlin Wall or the World Trade Center towers.

If you see that then you, in one glimpse, get how big that change was now that those things aren't here anymore. It's about that impact. They always say that if you read a book, you have an idea about how something happened or what happened; if you see the video [you] have an idea of what it looked like. But if you are on location and can look back in time using augmented reality it really hits home. You really get it, you really feel it, you get an insight instantly.

That is the unique thing for this medium. That's with history, also with art, with entertainment - you can come up with all kinds of concepts that are so deep in the experience that you can't do it in any other medium.

RWW: So right now, you have the phone, you have the direction the phone is pointing and you have a video camera and that's the basic medium, that's like the clay you use to build something. Will we see any drastic changes in that? What's the vision beyond the phone?

Lens-FitzGerald: The vision is vision. I mean, the key thing is that the camera will actually be able to see. And that's what everybody's working on. In your room you can see the lines in the room. Now what if the phone sees that and it can stabilize and image on that? And it can actually hang a picture there on the wall? That's where it's headed.

RWW: Any predictions on how far off we are from things like glasses that do this or other devices?

Lens-FitzGerald: Glasses, in a way, are there but they're kind of clunky still. I think they'll definitely come and it could be next year already. I wonder though, if you want glasses. It could be the car with wings, the flying car - we always think that we want it but looking back we can see that loads of version have been developed but nobody really liked them. We just thought we did. I think this could also be the case with the AR glasses. Of course, if you're a fighter plane pilot then you really want them, but for everyday like I think the phone is perfectly suited to do whatever we want.

RWW: Looking backwards, instead of forwards, what's the biggest challenge you've faced at Layar?

Lens-FitzGerald: Growing with the company. I remember in the beginning, when we were like swooped up by this tidal wave of attention and people offering stuff or wanting stuff, staying grounded, free of distractions - that was very difficult. It's about the product. It's about the company. That's always been the challenge.

RWW: One last question - putting aside all the barriers that exist right now, what's the ultimate future of AR?

Lens-FitzGerald: That is when AR is dead, when we don't really know that it's augmented reality anymore. You use it, you can't live without it anymore - maybe by then it's in our lenses. With a flip of a finger we change from the real reality to the bubbly version or with the flip of a finger I go to see your version that you're seeing right now, like a Skype call but through your eyes.

Imagine that - we don't even know it's augmented reality. It's integrated in our everyday life, in our everyday routine. You take it for granted like today you take for granted that all the computers are connected together and you have instant access to everything. It's about the connectivity of people and objects and places and the visualization of that. AR will disappear.

RWW: What is the hardware there? Is the hardware us? Is the hardware the object?

Lens-FitzGerald: In the end, I think the hardware is the object. It could be a phone, it could be glasses, it could be lenses but I think that's beside the point. It's that it works. Of course your car is nice but it's fun that you can go to your parents at Christmas with your car. It's about that latter part, not how you get there.

Want to learn more from Maarten Lens-FitzGerald? Register for the 2WAY Summit using this link and get $200 off select ticket levels.

Interview has been condensed and edited.

With all due respect, that critic is missing the point. Behind the design coolness, Planetary shows how data visualizations will become the new interface to your computing experiences. Whether on your mobile phone, tablet device, or walking along an urban street, increasingly you will control how you interact with apps using data visualizations of the kind offered by Planetary.

What's different about Planetary is that it doesn't depend on traditional software controls and design patterns - such as a play button, scrolling down a list of tracks, even flipping through album covers. Instead, the app is controlled by the data visualizations.

In a recent UgoTrade interview, futurist and author Bruce Sterling said of Planetary:

"The thing I consider significant about that remarkable piece of Bloom software is that it uses information visualization as a new breed of control interface. That's not just fancy re-skinning of the same old music-machine pushbuttons. That whole graphic shebang is generated in real-time on the fly. And you can run code with that, play music, do media with it! An advance like that is important."
(emphasis ours)

A Wired review of the app notes that it turns a data set - in this case music - into "tactile and dynamic visual objects."

Imagine those same techniques being used for data from social networking, location, media and real-world objects (the Internet of Things). That's an intriguing development and I'm curious to see what other apps Bloom releases over the course of this year.

When Planetary launched, CNET conducted an interview with Bloom co-founder Ben Cerveny. He firstly explained the origins of the company's name: "we'll make the invisible data visible. We'll make it Bloom."

Cerveny told CNET that Bloom's data visualization apps will become even more powerful once better structured data becomes available:

"...we're also looking to other sources of metadata to augment the somewhat unreliable ID3 tags attached to tracks in iTunes libraries. So many possibilities from more structured data sources could provide countless ways of seeing the constellations of tunes in new ways."

He went on to explain how the tablet has ushered in this new era of the user interface:

"The tablet is a total disruption of how we understand popular computing. The next era of experiences will be driven by visceral gesture-based input, and rich fluid responsiveness in native graphics contexts. I see the potential for Bloom to help define a "killer pattern" for application design."

The big question is whether Bloom can become more than the designer of a slightly gimmicky music app and truly change the way we experience media, social networking and more.

The 2-star reviewer may have been harsh, but they were correct to say that Planetary isn't actually that useful. It is however a clear indicator of the future of user interfaces - and Bloom is well positioned to be a star.

Mobilizy announced today at the BlackBerry World conference that Wikitude, the augmented reality browser, would be coming preloaded on millions of BlackBerry devices.

Upon hearing the news, we immediately had two reactions. First, is this a step up for augmented reality? Does this represent a more mainstream adoption? Or is this simply a business deal and will BlackBerry users see this as bloatware on their devices?

You've likely run across AR before - in my experience it is one of the first things sought out, downloaded and boasted about by new smartphone users. Admittedly, I was one of those folks. In that same experience, AR is also one of the first things that these self-same new users abandon, as they realize that holding their phones up and looking through the camera is not only an inefficient way to find information, but it's silly looking, to say the least.

Will the inclusion of an AR browser on new BlackBerry phones change anything about the user experience? No, but it could change something about the general acceptance and impression of augmented reality on the smartphone.

What do you think - is the preloading of Wikitude a sign of things changing and the beginning of adoption? Or is it simply a business deal and something that users will still ignore, outside of bragging about how cool their new phone is to their friends?

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Miami University's Augmented Reality Research Group (MU ARRG! - that exclamation point, I confess, is my addition), led by Professor Bo Brinkman, has developed an Android app that could save librarians a lot of time and hassle. Using the Android's camera, the app "reads" a bookshelf, and with an AR overlay, quickly flags those books that are misplaced. It will also point to the correct place on the bookshelf so the book can easily be re-shelved correctly.

The app can also aid with inventory, generating a report of what a library really has on its shelves.

There are a few drawbacks. Thin books, such as those found in the children's section, would be difficult to tag. Also, this prototype only uses 16 bits on the tag, but Brinkman says the group is working on a version that would allow them to put around 72 bits on a tag, allowing the system to scale up to work with any library collection.

The app was developed by undergraduate research assistant Matt Hodges, and it will be demoed next month at the Association of College and Research Libraries 2011 conference.

via Reddit; photo credits: Flickr user Stewart Butterfield

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What links did we miss? Let us know in the comments.

What links did we miss? Let us know in the comments.