Maybe. Many people in the Augmented Reality world are rolling their eyes at Layar's incredible media exposure. They worry that relatively simple implementations of this technology paradigm will create such a bubble of hype that software developed over decades will suffer as well, if public opinion crashes in a let-down from high expectations.

Fact of the matter is, sometimes Layar and other AR services work well and sometimes they don't. None of the mobile applications currently available actually process the live video they are looking at and respond, some just postulate at what should be where you're looking and others look for a very specific marker.

In other words, it's not at all like the Terminator view shown by CNN to illustrate the concept. Live video AR (called "true AR" by some in the industry) is just beginning to make an appearance on mobile devices. Layar could not identify pant sizes walking down the street if it wanted to.

Either way, here we are: AR is becoming the hot new thing and not just among geeks. It's hitting the mainstream. From CNN profiles like this to the next issue of Esquire Magazine. Even the New York Times is beginning to explore the possibilities - though the Times is both mainstream and full of super-geeks.

What do you think? Is Augmented Reality the next step for the internet? Displaying data about the world, on top of our view of the world, certainly seems compelling. Could mobile AR overtake traditional mobile browsing, photography, etc. and be second only to voice as the way people use their phones?

It seems possible. Here comes the future, when we get to find out.

The International Symposium on Augmented and Extended Reality this month had major sponsors from all around the world, including Qualcomm, Volkswagon, Intel and Nokia. Despite all this energy, media darling startup Layar is reported to have raised...a mere $1 million investment from venture capitalists. Why are VCs not investing more in Augmented Reality? Here are three reasons why we think investment in this sector has been slow so far.

Total Immersion, the company that made those awesome interactive 3D baseball cards (video below) has raised two rounds of funding over the last eight years. Metaio has forthcoming consumer apps but is a major B2B business in AR already - it wouldn't be a surprise if they've raised some money.

But for all the hype, this doesn't seem to be a field that investors are rushing to fund. Why is that? There are a number of theories.

AR is Just Hype, It's Not Useful

Lots of people are excited about AR, but is it just eye-candy? Mobile AR, the implementation most accessible to consumers today, is a little disappointing to use once you get past the initial Wow-factor.

Not everyone agrees, though, that there's no utility here. IT analyst firm Gartner named Augmented Reality one of its Top Ten Disruptive Technologies for 2008-2012.

It is early days. People have been hoping that AR will help with things like auto repair for years and the US Marines have seen big efficiency gains in tests of AR vehicle repair with an Android phone hooked up to a pair of goggles.

Advertising and marketing seem like the low hanging fruit but there's interest in medicine as well. Imagine anatomical models you could hold in your hand, turn around to look at and interact with or read about.

"The real impact of AR on business," consultant Tracy Sheridan says, "is money saved in manufacturing, training, etc. [and that] has been overshadowed by its role in digital marketing."

It's a Feature Not a Product

Who says the web is all about pages that you view in a browser? Check out these three visions of a fast-approaching future where data is drawn from and overlaid on top of the real world around us.

The Eye Pet is a virtual critter that you can interact with through a webcam on your computer. Check out this demo where the Sony Computer Entertainment Europe pets the animal and spins through a 3D menu of toys to play use in playing with it. It's pretty awesome. The Eye Pet is expected to be released for the PS3 game system as early as next month.

That looks like a lot of fun for kids (who knows about the psychological impact) but imagine other interactive 3D objects with menus of options like this. Occupational training possibilities? Sports practice? There seems to be a lot of possibilities.

Thanks to Canadian PhD student Gail Carmichael for shooting that video.

The New AR Paradigm: AR Sketch

We wrote about this international project last week and the team behind it went on to win the Best Student Paper award at the ISMAR conference.

AR Sketch takes drawn images, processes live video capture of the drawings and turns them into 3D image overlays. Then it subjects them to a physics simulation. The team behind it just happened to hack into the private API for live video processing on the iPhone and make it available to developers around the world, too.

Popular AR apps like Yelp or Layar on mobile phones don't actually know what they are looking at, they just know where you are and which direction you're facing. Thus they can tell you what they believe you're looking at. Marker-based AR apps know only to look for one thing - a printed marker with a pattern on it that triggers display of an overlay. Sketch AR needs neither guesses nor markers - it processes and augments what you're actually looking at.

It's nuts. As Ori Inbar wrote about the Sketch AR team in an overview of ISMAR, "Their work is revolutionizing the AR world by avoiding the need to print markers - or any images whatsoever."

Here Comes Microsoft AR!

Oxford's Georg Klein, whom Inbar calls "the smartest Computer Vision guy on the block," just joined Microsoft this month, conference-goers learned. Is Microsoft going to make a major Augmented Reality play? They'd be fools not to explore the possibility. They don't want to be left out in the cold if AR does become the next version of the web. Here's what their new man's been working on.

These exciting examples of Augmented Reality have little to do with mobile location awareness, a nice reminder that there's a whole lot more to the field. Mobile AR browsers are the best known commercial services so far, but academic research on other forms of AR has been going on for years.

Ready to browse and interact with data on top of the physical world, through webcams, mobile phones and increasingly svelte AR glasses? A future when such experiences are mainstream may be fast approaching.

Today at the Web 2.0 Summit, Brady Forrest of O'Reilly Media ran a panel called Humans As Sensors. With him were four organizations doing innovative applications using sensors: Markus Tripp (Mobilizy), Deborah Estrin (Computer Science Department, UCLA), Sharon Biggar (Path Intelligence), Di-Ann Eisnor (Waze).

Each of the speakers started by explaining what they do.

Eisnor said that Waze aimes to take sensor data from "entertainment to action." It started out being used to map objects, then people, now processes.

Path Intelligence is bringing online innovation to the real world, according to co-founder and the Chief Operating Officer Sharon Biggar. They are targeting the retail market - specifically shops in malls. She said that the online world is good at collecting data on user experience, but the local mall doesn't have that data.

What Path Intelligence is doing is analogous to Google Analytics, said Biggar. It works by collecting sensor datas and anonymous pings from cellphones - it doesn't require downloads.

Biggar said that what they are measuring is real-time behavior, "right now." One of their current aims is to help the offline retail industry cope with recession. At mall sites they respond directly to the way shoppers are behaving. They do this by installing sensors and accurately locating mobile phones indoors. They use that data to help businesses improve in the real world and in real time.

Mobilizy makes the AR browser Wikitude, which we have covered extensively here on ReadWriteWeb. It works on mobile phones that have GPS and a compass. As we've explained before, Wikitude is overlaid information on the real world.

What's next for the product? Mobilizy manager business development Markus Tripp said that they plan to open it for the public, so people can create content for AR. It will be in the same format as Google Earth.

Deborah Estrin from the Computer Science Department at UCLA was on next. She explained that they are doing a lot of research into "participatory sensing." They are taking it from aggregators to personal apps. The use cases include specific civic and citizen data campaigns. She suggested that what they do is "twitter with a purpose," although she admitted that this was a cynical thing to say.

Example apps include whatsinvasive.com - enabling users to provide data on what plants are invasive (weeds etc) - and Biketastic.

Discussion

The panel then had a discussion on where sensor and mobile-generated data is headed on the Web.

Brady asked the panel about how users can trust the data, whether it be implict or explicit.

Estrin from UCLA said that giving people visibility back into the data is key. Let people have legible feedback on the data. She also remarked that they always have "eyes on the process" - in other words, humans in the loop. So what they do is not entirely automated.

Waze has learned from web 2.0 that you need to apply different weighting for different people.

Brady asked next: what type of critical mass of people is needed for these kinds of apps?

Di-Ann Eisnor from Waze said that it really depends on the app and its goals. She noted that for them Israel was an incubator / test bed. So they shot for half a percent of the market.

Sharon Biggar from Path Intelligence agreed that it depends on the app and what you're trying to achieve. For them their focus is retail, so their comparison point (in terms of data) is what users had before they came along.

Deborah Estrin from UCLA remarked that as you get more data, you get more value.

Brady asked the magical Web 2.0 question: how do you all plan on making money?

Sharon Biggar from Path Intelligence explained that their business model is built into what they do: retail. She said that retailers will pay for the data they provide. However she noted that these companies "need to get the sensors out there, somehow" - which is a cost to those businesses.

Di-Ann Eisnor from Waze said that the "navigable data market" is worth $4B and is dominated by the big map data companies like Navteq. Waze sells their data at low cost, but she noted that Google is trying to disrupt the market. She admitted that this is shaking things up for Waze, but she thinks that location based services are coming into their own (which they are indeed, according to Morgan Stanley).

Markus Tripp from Mobilizy said that they are a very new business, but he said they are generating revenue. He said that the main goal with Wikitude is to get reach and as much content as possible into its system.

Brady asked as a final question: is Twitter the ultimate sensor?

Sharon Biggar from Path Intelligence said that Twitter data is "another indicator of interest" - another piece of data to add to the equation.

The iPhone has a private API for analysis of live-streaming video but developers' requests that it be made accessible haven't been granted by Apple. The new software opening up access to that API was made freely available to anyone this morning by the team that built it.

In a demonstration video the team showed how software built on top of the now-exposed API could look at a 2D image drawn on paper and render the image in 3D. Then the 3D rendering is subjected to a physics simulation.

This is of course just one use-case. Video AR-enabled software could do almost anything in direct response to the actual images seen through the iPhone's camera view, in real time. Image processing locally will be easier and faster than comparison with a large number of related images, something that would likely require some connection to the cloud, but these are early days.

GamesAlfresco author Ori Inbar calls this the dawn of an era of "user-generated Augmented Reality."

For the first time ever, the core code necessary for real augmented reality ("real" here means precise alignment of graphics overlaid on real life objects) on iPhone 3.0 is available to the public

How will Apple respond? That's a big question; the company has had an ambivalent relationship with the emerging field of Augmented Reality so far and exercises infamously obtuse control over applications distributed through its app store.

For now the code is being distributed for its creators by Ori Inbar, whose email address to request it is available at the conclusion of his coverage on GamesAlfresco.

The possibilities here are huge. While location-based AR is clumsy at best so far, due to the imprecise nature of GPS and mapping data, these kinds of object-centric AR tied to the actual viewed world open up a whole new world of potential developments. Let's see what you've got, AR devs of the world!

Today Apple both approved the most eagerly anticipated Augmented Reality app yet, Amsterdam's AR browser Layar (iTunes link), and made its primary challenger, Wikitude (iTunes link), a featured app in the iTunes App Store.

Its competitor Wikitude displays Wikipedia data (as Layar does) as well as user-generated Points of Interest input through its website Wikitude.me. Wikitude was made a featured app in iTunes today, just hours before Layar went live in the store.

A long list of AR companies were at the edge of their seats waiting for a big announcement in September, believing that Apple would make public all the technical hooks they needed to create an Augmented Reality experience. Instead of the expected opening-up and perhaps some publicity for this very eye-catching software niche, Apple opened up only some of the APIs needed, didn't make any public mention of AR and has slowly let AR apps trickle into the App Store with no fan-fare over the last month.

Robert Rice wrote in an open letter last week that:

"One of two things needs to happen. Either Apple needs to quit screwing us around and make [all] the APIs public so we can get back to the business of innovating and building a new industry, or the respective communities of developers and venture capitalists need to abandon Apple entirely. There are good alternatives out there that may not be as shiny, but are certainly as powerful and definitely more open for us to work with."

It's also possible that Apple hasn't been offering AR apps meaningful support because so far they are a little dissapointing once consumers get their hands on them. GPS data is clumsy, data sets are incomplete and the user experience still hasn't been nailed yet by anyone. It's also borderline embarrassing to wave your phone around in the air when out in public, surrounded by people you don't know. That's quite unlike the usual experience Apple tries to associate with itself.

Perhaps things are changing, though. It's exciting to think about bringing latent geo-located data out into a view accessible through a mobile phone. It would be nice to see Apple help advance this early field, instead of giving it the cold shoulder and silent treatment. End-users should recognize as well that the super-wow but controlled experience of the iPhone could be holding back other, even more exciting innovations.

Wikitude and Cyclopedia are the names of the apps and both require the new iPhone 3GS. That's because the 3GS is the first iPhone with an internal compass - Augmented Reality (AR) apps use your phone's GPS to know where you are and the compass to know which direction you're looking at. Then these two apps can tell you what you're looking at that's written up in Wikipedia. Here's how the two different apps compare.

Cyclopedia (iTunes link) is the newest app from a dev shop called Chemical Wedding. It scores high on visual interface but is relatively simple, displaying only Wikipedia content. It got a write-up on Gizmodo yesterday, was read about by more than 10,000 people, but saw very little discussion. There is no Android version of this app and we haven't been able to test it yet, but it costs $2 in the iPhone app store.

The app has been out since July but the company hasn't been on the radar of any of the AR-watchers we know. GamesAlfresco, the leading AR news blog we've found, has never mentioned this app once. Presumably the company would have sold a lot more software if it had bothered to tell people it existed. When tens of thousands of people went crazy in August checking out the Yelp iPhone app, believing it was the first AR implementation live in the iTunes store, no one from Chemical Wedding bothered to speak up about having an iPhone AR app for sale. There's not even a link to the app in iTunes on the company's own website. Update: Chemical Wedding contacted us and said that the app really only went live a few days go after all and that the lack of a link was an oversight. We apologize if we were rude in pointing it out. :)

Wikitude

Wikitude is a well-developed AR app already available on Android phones for months. It just launched on the iPhone today. The company launched the app without telling anyone, but word got passed around this afternoon on Twitter.

Wikitude has a less shiny interface than Cyclopedia but has a lot more data and is more accessible for users to add data to. I really like Wikitude. It displays Wikipedia data, but also data from international local review site Qype. Most importantly, Wikitude lets anyone add Points of Interest to the Augmented Reality app through a dead-simple interface at Wikitude.me. I spent an hour last month marking up Portland, Oregon and now anyone in town can see my notes on locations through their phone and the Wikitude app.

It's because Wikitude is so open to user generated content that I find it the most exciting of all the Augmented Reality apps. Unfortunately, none of these apps that I've tested on Android are performing fabulously yet - the GPS is just too imprecise and the data too sparse. These are early days though, and even today it's a lot of fun to look at the world around you through Wiki articles.

Collaborative annotation of the physical world? It just doesn't get much cooler than that. Hopefully the technology will continue to improve and more people will learn about what these companies are doing.

Augmented Reality apps have been slowly trickling into the iPhone for the last several weeks but Layar's flashy platform for displaying all kinds of different data sets, from Yelp reviews to Trulia real-estate listings, on top of the phone's camera view has been the most eagerly awaited.

The current degree of refinement in GPS and map accuracy in the US may need to evolve further before you can reliably stand in front of a place, point an Augmented Reality app at it and get the information that you're looking for - but big picture, nearby information is available now. The act of looking through your phone, at the world around you, at layers of data on top of physical objects, is something that the human mind and user experience design will need to work on before these apps can turn from "wow" to a tool people use daily.

That's our take on it, but iPhone owners should be able to test Layar for themselves soon. In the mean time, 3GS owners might try out DA Transit (iTunes link), an Augmented Reality app for finding transit information around the US that's already live in the iTunes store.

Today, Austrian smartphone development shop Mobilizy, creator of the Wikitude World Browser, has announced it will be presenting a standard AR markup language (ARML) to the the AR Consortium. Such a step would remove one of the five barriers to AR that we recently wrote about: interoperability. Cross-platform, open development standards would allow users more ways to see more AR content. Read on for a video and details.

In our recent post on barriers to mobile AR, Marshall Kirkpatrick wrote, "Right now you cannot see information from the Wikitude AR environment if you're looking through the Layar AR browser. This could be the coming of a new browser war just like that of the 1990s... A lack of interoperability between AR environments would be a tragedy of the same type as if the web had remained defined by the islands of AOL and Compuserve or Internet Explorer, forever."

Layar, Mobilizy's biggest competitor in the AR space and who just today announced the addition of a 3D interface to its platform, has spoken publicly about interoperability in the past. Layar's co-founder Maarten Lens-Fitzgerald told us, "The lock-ins and exclusivity won't work. Openness and interoperability are where it's going; we're going to discover how exactly with other people...That's where it's going: control to the user."

The basic idea of the ARML specification is that the data can be viewed on any augmented reality browser but also in Google Earth. Augmented reality browsers can include an open URL dialog where the user can enter an URL pointing to a valid ARML document, and users can then easily bookmark those URLs. The markup language is based on KML, Google's Keyhole Markup Language for mapping applications that was just turned over to the Open Geospatial Consortium last year.

Here's a video from Wikitude explaining more:

Features of the proposed specification include the following:

• Founded upon KML with extension name-space for AR specific data;
• Placement of a "View in AR" icon which clearly identifies a mobile
• website that supports location aware (real time) data in an ARML
• browser;
• Compliance with basic XML document structure - no proprietary
• programming API required to create an AR layer.
• ARML adherent data can be viewed on ARML browsers (e.g. Wikitude)
• and KML browsers (e.g. Google Earth);
• Custom styling of AR data (points of interest) via standard KML
• styling elements; and
• Initial support for UTF-8 encoding.

Mobilizy is offering limited access to the preview version of their upcoming ARML browser. Interested parties and developers with questions about the ARML specification should email Mobilizy.

The app isn't available yet but is coming to the iPhone, presumably when Apple offers the full support for AR that countless developers are waiting for. WorkSnug seems very handy and it's a good example of a one-off AR app that could serve people well outside the full AR platforms like Layar and Wikitude - but the simple fact of the matter is that it's just plain cool.

In April we reported statistics from browser company Opera showing large growth on the Mobile Web. According to Opera, there was a 157% increase in usage of their Opera Mini web browser from March 2008 to March 2009. What's driving that growth is devices like the iPhone, new mobile operating systems like Android, and hot applications like Augmented Reality.

We named Apple our Best Bigco of 2008, mostly due to the success of the iPhone and accompanying App Store. By most statistics, Apple is in a fairly dominant position in the Mobile Web. At the beginning of the year we reported data from AdMob (a leading mobile advertising marketplace) showing that Apple has a 48% market share of smartphone traffic in the United States. That figure doesn't just come from the iPhone, but the iPod touch too.

By June 2009, Apple's share of smartphone traffic in the U.S. had surged to 64%. Perhaps more significantly though, Apple's share of worldwide smartphone traffic had increased to 47%. This is important, because internationally other smartphones were utilized much more than in the U.S. before the iPhone arrived.

However, Apple can't afford to rest on its laurals. Google's mobile OS Android has been making rapid progress. According to the latest Admob statistics available, for July '09, requests from the Android Operating System increased 53% month over month and Android now has 7% worldwide OS share. The iPhone OS dropped slightly to 45% worldwide and 60% in the U.S.

Bigco Initiatives & Trendy Startups

All of the big Internet companies have strong Mobile Web initiatives. We discussed Apple and Google above.

Yahoo continues to push Mobile Web, which currently goes under the OneConnect brand.

Microsoft has announced a number of mobile initiatives this year, including a mobile version of Microsoft Office and MySpace bringing its platform to Windows Mobile phones.

Earlier this month Facebook announced a mobile expansion of their Facebook Connect platform. "Facebook Connect for Mobile Web" enables developers to add a Facebook Connect button to their apps in order to make them more social.

Probably of most interest is watching the up and coming Mobile Web startups. We've had our eye on Brightkite for some time, but perhaps the trendiest startup right now is Foursquare. It's a location-aware social app for the iPhone, but only available in a limited number of countries currently.

Augmented Reality

Augmented reality, the addition of a layer to the world on your mobile device, has been a very hot trend this year. As we noted in August, it is in everything from mobile apps to kids toys. Many people think that "AR" will soon be talked about by everyone the way they used to talk about "social media" and "Web 2.0" before that. That remains to be seen, but there's no denying there is a lot of interest in AR right now.

As we reported at the end of August, the AR apps are starting to flow into Android (the early leader in this space) and iPhone devices. We reported that the Paris Metro Subway was apparently the first AR-enabled app to be accepted into iTunes. Then came a new Yelp app with AR, which any 3Gs owner can turn on by shaking their phone. Presselite, the company that made the Paris Metro Subway app, followed up with a London Bus app for the App Store.

Conclusion

Clearly mobile devices are an increasingly important way to access the Web. Many of our readers have smartphones nowadays, a good proportion of them being iPhones or Android devices (our statistics prove this). And there is no shortage of mobile web applications flowing into the App Store and Android's marketplace - not to forget Nokia and other prominent mobile manufacturers.

What's perhaps most encouraging however, is the entirely new class of mobile apps we're seeing. Augmented Reality is the most obvious example. It's been a big year for mobile, with much promise to come.

ReadWriteWeb's Top 5 Web Trends of 2009:

1. Structured Data
2. The Real-Time Web
3. Personalization
4. Mobile Web & Augmented Reality
5. Internet of Things

In the App Store on the phone, Apple will now also give users recommendations for other apps. We only got a short time to test this feature, and it seemed to work well so far, but we will hold back our final judgment until we get to test it for a bit longer.

Other new features include the ability to save videos from the Mail and MMS app. MMS, of course, isn't available in the US yet, though according to some reports, options for MMS are now available in the settings in anticipation of AT&T's launch of MMS for the iPhone.

Also new in 3.1 are the ability to use voice control for the iPhone 3GS over Bluetooth, calendar notifications that now display a 'location' field, and the ability to pass phone numbers into the phone app's dialer (the app will automatically convert alphanumeric numbers like 1-800-CALLRWW into real phone numbers). The phone now also vibrates while a user moves icons around on the screen.

What About Augmented Reality?

As for Augmented Reality, Apple gave users (and developers) the impression that the 3.1 firmware would provide support for AR apps. However, as Orin Inbar points out on Games Alfresco, 3.1 only brings 'semi support' for AR apps. Wile developers can now overlay graphics on a live video stream, it is still not possible for developers to actually analyze the live video stream. Many AR apps like ARSights track markers or objects and then replace them with their own info. On the iPhone, this is currently only supported through a private API and, as Inbar notes, chances are that Apple won't allow such an app into the store.

On the other hand, though, apps that don't need this functionality and only need to be able to overlay text over a video such as Layar or Wikitude should now be a possibility on the iPhone after they already made their debut on Android quite a while ago.

Apple's List

Here is Apple's own list of all the other updates in iPhone 3.1:

• Improved syncing for music, movies, TV shows, podcasts, and photos
• iTunes U content organization
• Redeem iTunes Gift Cards, codes, and certificates in the App Store
• Display available iTunes account credits in the App Store and iTunes Store
• Save video from Mail and MMS into Camera Roll
• Option to "Save as new clip" when trimming a video on iPhone 3GS
• Better iPhone 3G Wi-Fi performance when Bluetooth is turned on
• Remotely lock iPhone with a passcode via MobileMe
• Use Voice Control on iPhone 3GS with Bluetooth headsets
• Paste phone numbers into the keypad
• Option to use Home button to turn on accessibility features on iPhone 3GS
• Warn when visiting fraudulent websites in Safari (anti-phishing)
• Improved Exchange calendar syncing and invitation handling
• Fixes issue that causes some app icons to display incorrectly

Nokia released a video today that demonstrates how Augmented Reality could be served up using glasses and other fashion accessories. In the video embedded below you'll see a woman surf the web and post rudimentary IM replies all using her eyeballs. It's a cool video, but it does raise one big question about AR: how can AR apps best add value to the physical world around us? This Nokia video is eye catching, but it doesn't answer that question.

From the video's description on YouTube:

This concept allows to you to experience immersion and effortless navigation in an Augmented Reality environment. New types of interactions involving near-to-eye displays, gaze direction tracking, 3D audio, 3D video, gesture and touch. Through these new types of social linkages people will be connected in innovative ways between the physical and digital worlds.

It's hands-free and weightless compared to a tablet, no small screen problem as you have on a mobile phone - but is it truly useful? Unlike most other AR apps we've seen lately, where the physical world is referenced by the AR - the two seem unrelated here. It takes all kinds, though, and who's to say how AR will be used?

(Also, isn't this music a little creepy? It sounds bittersweet about the inevitable and yet slightly frightening future.)

None the less, we'd love to get our hands on a prototype of this technology to test it - just as soon as it becomes real.

Thanks to Rouli Nir for tweeting about this.

The company says its API "represents the emergence of an open AR development platform which could further drive the adoption of Wikitude as a potential standard for developers who want to create their own mobile AR experience." Get ready to see Augmented Reality come to far more mobile applications and for Wikitude's competitors to respond.

Wikitude says it worked with more than 100 developers from 25 countries in building its API. Both commercial and non-commercial API keys are available to remove the watermark placed over non-keyed implementations. The API allows developers to customize the actions that occur when info-balloon overlays are clicked on and change the menu options for the AR browser.

Will competitors like Layar, AcrossAir, Tochnidot, RobotVision and others release APIs soon as well? They have to be working on it, but Wikitude appears to have the most open disposition, one of the broadest developer communities and thus may be the best suited to become the AR platform of choice.

There are enough players in the AR field already that the competition will likely come down to two things: usability of interfaces and developer-friendliness. May the games begin!

There will be an awkward interim phase when we'll have to get used to the word "First!" popping up every time we look at something. But that should pass, and soon we'll reach the new exciting future long dreamed of by our ancestors, when we'll finally be able to discover the name of any piece of Ikea furniture just by staring at it. ("Spugnubb! I should have known.")

Then again, we live in a world of climate change, poverty, the pandemic flu, peak oil, collapsing ocean eco-systems, Glenn Beck, and an impending sequel to Twilight. Maybe the next killer app will be diminished reality.

More Noise to Signal.