RobotVision is a new Augmented Reality (AR) app for the iPhone 3Gs. It's not available yet, but it will be as soon as AR apps are formally welcomed into the App Store by Apple, probably sometime next month. AR browsers "turn the world inside out" by exposing latent online information about your surroundings; there will soon be enough of them that they will compete based on user experience. RobotVision looks like it could be a good one.

Does that mean that AR browsers will be commodities? "I hope not, for my sake!" Sears says, "But I do think there's going to be a lot of them. I look at it just like building a website. You have your data source and you're just trying to parse and present your data in a meaningful way, just like you would on the web."

Layar, Wikitude, Yelp, PresseLite, AcrossAir - the Augmented Reality market is heating up fast and there's not even official support for AR on the iPhone yet. (Android welcomes AR apps already.) Sears guesses that once that support comes, as many as half a dozen other competitors may pop up. It may be far more than that. Sears says he plans on building one-off white label implementations of RobotVision as his business model; Universities might want a version for campus locations, for example.

What is Sears bringing to market product-wise to try to differentiate? User experience development is what he's spending the majority of his time on right now.

By using Bing Local search to glean location and business review data, RobotVision gets access to some key Bing features like aggregated reviews from CitySearch, Judy's Book and Yelp. Bing looks at the reviews of restaurants and tells you how they stack up in aggregate for a business' food, ambience, service and more. (That's a feature we've seen at BooRah, though that service doesn't have access to Yelp reviews.)

If you've seen the new Yelp iPhone AR (it just launched yesterday), you probably noticed that all the pushpin markers for sites in the direction you're facing are lined up top to bottom. RobotVision layers its presentation based on proximity and then paginates the windows that appear when you click on a marker, so it's easy to browse nearby spots.

RobotVision's options to view local Tweets and Flickr photos bring more richness to the places you're looking at.

When you point your phone at the ground with RobotVision running, it switches to map mode and displays pushpin markers for all the nearby spots in that format.

UX and AR

There are a lot of possible ways RobotVision could integrate the map and the AR camera view in this app. AR is hot, but a good AR app in the future will probably defer to other ways of displaying data when appropriate. AR should complement other ways of seeing the world around us, not be expected to replace maps, lists or the naked eye.

These are the very early days of Augmented Reality apps, and current implementations are very simple. Even in their simplicity, though, there will be a lot of variance in the ways that different parts of a UI work together on each respective AR app.

Putting geo-tagged data on top of a mobile phone's camera viewer is not difficult. How an AR platform goes about collecting, displaying and interacting with those layers of data will probably make the difference in a crowded market. (For more on the UX of AR, see this long post by Joe Lamantia.)

Problems With RobotVision and AR Apps in General

AR apps are at the mercy of the publishers of the data they display. RobotVision's comprehension of its surroundings was pretty good in our tests, but not perfect. One restaurant we walked past didn't show up when we pointed a phone at it - but its information did appear when we pointed away from the building and down the street.

Sears says that GPS on mobiles still takes some time to calibrate each time you turn it on. It's often not that accurate anyway, and many places are mapped to their nearest street intersection instead of their exact location. Likewise, if a phone doesn't have a clear line of sight to a GPS satellite, then further inaccuracies can occur. Inaccuracies in location-based Augmented Reality mean that you could be shown things that aren't really there and miss things that you ought to see.

We suspect that just as GPS data providers historically didn't want to make GPS data available in real-time until the killer turn-by-turn driving apps that required it arrived, so too could a new economy of GPS users seeking greater location accuracy for Augmented Reality help usher in a more accurate level of service.

These are very early days for the world of commercially available Augmented Reality, but its utility and value are clear to many people. Bring on the competition and best software to win the hearts and handsets of users!

Tim Sears expects to launch RobotVision next month. He'll launch his AR browser at the same time that many other people launch theirs.

It has been widely reported that the API required to display Augmented Reality (AR) layers of data on top of the camera view of a non-jailbroken iPhone 3Gs would not be publicly exposed until the launch of the next version of the iPhone Operating System, expected this Fall. Many developers are patiently waiting, but some have now found a way around the restriction. We just received word of the 3rd AR-enabled app hitting the iTunes store.

The London Bus app is even selling data sets through in-app purchases. From its iTunes description:

It is now possible to add new Point of Interest (POI) databases to London Bus application via in-app purchase. These options allow you to activate Food & Drink POI, Leisure POI, Attractions POI and Accommodation POI all over the UK.

This AR economy is moving faster than we expected.

All three of these were existing established apps that received AR capabilities in an update, not dedicated AR apps seeking admission for the first time. We've been unable to determine how this was achieved technically (Presselite of course won't say), but rumor has it that the apps may be leveraging a third-party code base called ARToolkit (or iPhoneARToolkit). Others point to software called ChromelessImagePickerController.

Can Apple now fairly deny other apps that seek to bring AR to the iPhone? We can't imagine that they would shut down Yelp's wildly successful app.

Presumably many developers will continue to wait, hoping that the software they've already built will be enabled as soon as next month. Others will probably try to get their apps in ahead of the official announcement of AR support from Apple. That's got to take some wind out of the sails of those companies that have been waiting patiently.

They may only be the beginning and they may not be high-profile or officially supported by Apple yet, but it couldn't be clearer: Augmented Reality apps have come to the iPhone.

Blogger Robert Scoble discovered the hidden feature and posted about it on FriendFeed today. A screenshot is below.

See also, from 1 hour later: The Wall Has Fallen: 3 Augmented Reality Apps Now Live in iPhone App Store

Right: Blogger Josh Bancroft is surrounded by Yelp-reviewed businesses when he looks south.

Developers did not expect to be able to get Augmented Reality apps into the App Store until the release of the next iPhone OS this fall. Earlier this week, though, we reported on what appeared to be the very first - an update to an app called Metro Paris Subway.

Layar and Wikitude, two European companies offering multi-purpose AR browsers, both have Android AR apps that include content for the United States, but neither company has released an iPhone app yet. Layar's CEO said yesterday that he was testing an iPhone version of his company's software and that it was "very fast."

Building a little AR into an already established app seems to be the method of choice for sneaking AR into the app store.

This may be what the future of mobile Augmented Reality looks like: many vendors offering their own in-app AR views, and a handful of AR browsers like Layar, Wikitude and Acrossair aggregating many different published AR views or layers.

Yelp + Digg + Foursquare = GraffitiGeo

GraffitiGeo's first mobile application will initially suffer from all the usual problems of sites and services that rely on user-generated reviews. Until enough people start using the service, there won't be much value to it. While the concept behind the mobile review app is solid, its focus primarily on restaurants at the moment means it's not likely to attract a large user base right off the bat. There are already a large number of mobile restaurant applications out there, not to mention there's Yelp, which does restaurant reviews and a lot more.

The GraffitiGeo team acknowledges they have competition in this area, but are quick to point out the others' shortcomings. For example, Yelp reviews are too long - especially in "the day and age of Twitter," they write on their blog. They also incorporate the Digg-like voting element for fast rankings (which Yelp does not), offer Facebook Connect integration for easy sign in, introduce nifty heatmaps to highlight the hotspots, and let you leave a comment with only 2 taps (Yelp takes 5-6). In short, they feel they've designed an application specifically for the mobile platform where Yelp just ported their successful website to mobile instead.

The Digg-like voting aspect is probably the app's killer feature. Instead of star ratings or lengthy reviews, you can simply vote "thumbs up" in order to rate a restaurant positively or a "thumbs down" if you're not so pleased. This ease-of-use makes the barrier to entry that much lower and could encourage more participation from casual users.

Another element to GraffitiGeo is the game aspect. This may or may not be a plus, in our opinion. With inspiration obviously borrowed from mobile social network/game Foursquare, GraffitiGeo awards points for any activity, whether that's a vote, a comment, or anything else. After reaching 100 points (aka "street cred"), you can start or join a "mob." Not a violent mob, of course, just a "mob." Mobs can claim territories which, in turn, unlocks more features in the application. There are also badges which can be earned. The entire setup is explained here. It's a bit complex and frankly, we're not sure if this is the sort of app that needs a gameplay element. If you're trying to find out if a restaurant is worth trying out, you're probably more interested in reading reviews and checking ratings than you are in playing with a bunch of online friends.

Even Better: An Augmented Reality Version

The real trick up GraffitiGeo's sleeve, however, is the app that's yet to come. Basically, the next app from GraffitiGeo is an augmented reality version of what's described above. That sounds much more appealing, to be honest. With the iPhone's viewfinder, you scan the restaurant in question and GraffitiGeo comments will float across your screen. What's really cool about the AR app, though, is that you don't necessarily have to have a restaurant in the viewfinder to see these ratings. Because the app is location-based, it knows what's nearby. In the demo, they aim the app down the street from where they're standing and GraffitiGeo displays the ratings for all the restaurants on that block. If you're ever just wandering around looking for a place to eat, this could be a real timesaver. We imagine you'll then be able to interact with the app in other ways, too, but that's hard to tell from the YouTube video demo.

GraffitiGeo's first effort may or may not be worth your time, especially considering its already robust competition, but the AR app definitely looks worth the wait.

SHARED TRAVEL PLANNING: Both Tripit and Dopplr are fantastic tools for keeping track of itineraries and sharing travel plans with friends. Meanwhile Gliider is a great tool for saving large blocks of trip-related text and syncing them to offline folders.

gliider from jared richardson on Vimeo.

DIRECTIONS: TeleNav provides GPS services for a number of mobile devices including the iPhone. The tool offers voice driving directions, spoken address recognition, rerouting for accidents and traffic jams, and locates wireless hotspots, the lowest gas prices, parking lots and ATMs. TomTom for iPhone is also expected to be a great tool as the docking station doubles as a charger.

FOOD: Many of us are familiar finding food with the Yelp and Urbanspoon iPhone apps; however, if you want an authentic road trip experience you might want to consult Roadfood. This site lays claim to the "most memorable local eateries along the highways and back roads of America." We get heart palpitations just looking at the heaping plates of pulled pork, burgers and ribs. Meanwhile, if you're looking to picnic with something more healthy and sustainable, Local Harvest's farmer's market finder coupled with the Locavore iPhone app offer users the chance to find local in-season produce. Locallectual offers a similar tool with their iLocavore app.

VIDEOS & PHOTOS: One way to get images up quickly is to stream them directly from your camera. Eye-Fi uses a wireless connection to upload photos and videos directly to your Facebook, YouTube, Flickr and Picassa accounts. If you want to live stream sans touch ups or editing, Eye-Fi is an extremely useful cordless solution. Other mobile streaming video and image options include Qik, Flixwagon, Stickam, Justin.tv and Kyte Producer.

GEO-TAGGING: AroundShare is a mobile application that allows users to publish photos to Google Maps. Meanwhile, Flickr's users can also organize their videos and photos on a map via the site's geo-tagging features. As for geo-based discovery, Flickr mobile utilizes the locational features of the Android and iPhone and allows members to explore public photos from nearby sites.

TRACKING:Google Latitude lets users share their location on a map in real time from their phones or computers. Maps can be embedded in public websites and road trippers appear as moving dots on the map. Imagine your best friend surprising you with Thai food just as you pull up to your hotel. Services like Brightkite and Loopt also broadcast your location; however, these services are based on push notifications rather than real time tracking.

TELLING THE STORY: The Whuffaoke group is using Dipity to aggregate their media. The service allows users to upload their Tweets, blog posts and photo sets to a map, time line and flip book interface. The nice thing about this tool is that it can either be embedded (as seen here) or shared via Facebook, Delicious, StumbleUpon, Reddit or Digg. Other tools to aggregate road trip-related media include JS-Kit's Echo, Disqus or an embedded hashtag feed.

According to USA Today and AriWriter, to address this perceived injustice, Yelp has been discussing the option to let businesses have a say on the public review page.  Up until now, the best a business could do is privately mail the individuals posting the bad reviews and hopefully get the reviewer to change their mind enough to update their review. With the new process, a business can, after being authorized as the listed business in question, register a follow-up comment on a negative (or positive) review.

All we have today to look at is a screenshot (link to a larger version here) of what this might look like in an upcoming version of Yelp. Yelp will have to tread carefully with this as its user base, although fiercely loyal and protective of the service, is also usually very pro-consumer as well, and any move that looks like a concession or sellout to business interests might end up being harmful to its image down the road.

Why We Need This

Sites like Yelp, Amazon, the iTunes store, and others have been coming under fire for not having trustworthy reviews. Thanks to anonymous user IDs on some sites, reviewers can be anyone with any agenda. Often they are. On Lunch, however, those drive-by reviews contributed by someone associated with the company or product being reviewed (or with an axe to grind) will not be prominently featured. The reason? Lunch.com's Similarity Network.

The Similarity Network

The Similarity Network is probably the most important feature of this new community - without it, Lunch would just be just another Yelp. After signing up, you kick start the matching engine by playing "ExhilaRATE." Although that name is somewhat unintuitive, clicking the link takes you to a section of the site where you can - guess what? - rate things like movies, books, food, sports, politics, animals...whatever. The experience of rating items here is a lot like that of Amazon's recommendation engine. If you've ever killed a few minutes on Amazon training it to get to know you better, you'll find Lunch.com's engine fairly similar.

The difference is that Lunch.com's engine groups things to rate into categories with titles that sound a lot like Facebook Apps (Top Movies of 2009, What's your Favorite Wine?). The Facebook flavor to these "games" makes sense because in the future, Lunch.com will launch a Facebook connected-experience, perhaps even a standalone app. In the meantime, however, you must go to the site to rate items.

The more you rate on Lunch, the better your matches become. You can see your matches and the percentage of compatibility between you and those like you. There are also tag cloud displays that show what items you both like and which ones you don't.

With Lunch, You Can Rate Anything

If you're still wondering why you would migrate away from more mainstream sites to something like Lunch.com, there's another reason this particular community holds appeal: it allows you to make anything ratable. Again unlike Yelp, ratings don't have to focus on products, services, places, etc. They could also be opinion pieces - like what you thought of Michelle Obama's new outfit for example. That opens the door for a much wider range of recommendations and - since you're matched with those like you - those recommendations will be relevant to your interests.

Lunch.com is in private beta, but you can try it now with the invite code "ReadWriteWeb." To use it, just click the link on the right-hand side of the screen that says "Have an invite code?"

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We do like the idea of these features. But in a way, these features are walking a line that Gmail has carefully been avoiding in directly marking up the information inside an email. Of course, we realize these features are optional and that Google already mines email contained within Gmail for keywords to power their contextually-sensitive ads, but these tools go a step further and modify the content of the message.

We would also like to note that the enhanced content is not in the printable view, so if you were thinking you could quickly print out that email with the attached Yelp review, you will find the additional content isn't there. That said, these features are fun and are another stepping stone for Labs in their continuing quest to find ways of constructively enhancing the Gmail experience.

When we say that semantic technology has a whole lot of awesome potential, this is a fun example of what we're talking about. If it can be done for restaurants, we expect similar analysis of online sentiment can be sold for all kinds of different real-world sectors.

Now restaurant owners can subscribe to receive a PDF of their monthly reports for an introductory price of $15 and a regular price of $25 per month. (Here's a sample report, in PDF format.)

Simple charts and a straightforward presentation can offer restaurant owners nervous about the Wild West of online opinion a bird's eye view of what's really going on, month by month. On the down side, the reports may enable those business owners to spot and track down negative reviewers to hassle them for the injustices they've no doubt done to a fine eatery.

Think many restaurants will go for it? That depends on how it's marketed, but we expect that today's coverage in the San Francisco Chronicle will help.

We first reviewed semantic and natural language processing review aggregation service BooRah this Spring and said we could foresee giving up Yelp for it. Then in December we called BooRah one of the Top 10 Semantic Web Products of 2008.

Now this latest offering has got us really excited; its simple utility and mainstream appeal are really compelling.

We love the idea of selling aggregate reports of online activity, intelligently analyzed, to mainstream businesses effected by online activity. Sales, marketing and PR firms have paid hefty sums for these kinds of reports, often clumsily gathered and presented, for years. Aim the semantic web at the problem, give it a good price point and offer it to a very large sector of businesses and we may just see some action in the semantic technology sector after all.

Update: Our original title for this story referenced Yelp, whom we mistakenly thought were included in BooRah's aggregation of reviews. Yelp contacted us to say that they are in fact not included. We hope that will change soon - it would only make both sites more useful.

The first service to feature BooRah's data is Kosmix.com, a small semantic search engine that now prominently displays BooRah ratings and data for most restaurant related searches.

Competition

Yelp, BooRah's most direct competitor, also features a comprehensive set of APIs and developers have already made good use of it while developing mobile applications, especially on the iPhone. The availability of these APIs has given Yelp a clear boost in the past.

BooRah is playing catch-up here, but it does have enough features to differentiate itself from its competition and this API is a step in the right direction. The only feature that seems missing from the API to make it even more useful is the ability to send reviews to BooRah directly.

Joel on Software, who has a lot of influence in the programming world, comes down hard with his post entitled Architecture Astronauts Are Back:

"The term Web 2.0 particularly bugs me. It's not a real concept. It has no meaning. It's a big, vague, nebulous cloud of pure architectural nothingness. [...] I hereby pledge never again to use the term "Web 2.0" on this blog, or to link to any article that mentions it."

Yikes! Then Dare Obasanjo, fresh from asking a thousand and one questions at the Web 2.0 Conference, adds:

"I am interested in discussions on the Web as a platform and even folksonomies (not tagging) but the marketplace of ideas has been polluted by all this "Web 2.0" garbage. Once again, I've flipped the bozo bit on Web 2.0. Like Joel, you won't see any use of the term on my blog or in items I link to from now on."

Oh and The Register is having a whale of a time mocking Web 2.0. This is the latest from "Andrew Orlowski in San Francisco":

"Web 2.0 is made of ... * Badger's paws * A magic swirling ship * Javascript worms * Recycled copies of Esther Dyson's Release 1.0 newsletter * Never mind, just give us the money"

But really, there's only so much unconstructive criticism I can bear. I'm a bit odd like that, but I hate reading cynical things - even if they're witty. So how about I finish this post with something that actually contributes to the Web 2.0 discussion, whether or not you think Web 2.0 is bullshit. Dave Winer has some thought-provoking questions:

"Isn't it interesting that between the supposed 1.0 (pet food companies doing high tech IPOs) and 2.0 (build to flip the Flickr of evrything) we changed millennia? Are we still creating monocultures?"

The serious and worrying thing for me is that I'm writing a book about Web 2.0. But then I believe there are a great many things of value in Web 2.0 and that's what keeps me going. My job is to distill all the signal from the noise - and most of the noise is coming from the anti-Web 2.0 brigade currently. I am also trying to pin down the long-term trends for the Web, together with the real disruptive things that are changing the Web.

Oy. So how was the TechCrunch party last night?

"We didn't want to simply bolt new features onto old interfaces. We needed to rethink email, but at the same time we needed to respect that email already had over 30 years of history, thousands of existing programs, and nearly a billion users. So we started by learning which features were most important, and which problems were most aggravating. We also realized that solving everyone's problems was too big of a challenge for the first release. It would be better to build a product that a lot of people love, than one that everyone tolerates, and so that was our goal."

Gmail was released on 1 April, 2004. Apart from the gimmick of offering 1000MB of storage, Gmail had these innovations:

"Gmail included a quick and accurate search. It introduced powerful new concepts to organize email, such as the conversation view (so now I can finally see all those replies at once). It provided a fast and dynamic interface from web browsers everywhere, popularizing the techniques that have since become known as AJAX."

I'm a big fan of Gmail. Even though it's not perfect and the occasional "oops please check back later" messages can be annoying, Gmail is to my mind the first email system that was built purely for the Web. There were earlier web email systems, of course - Hotmail and Oddpost for example. But it wasn't until Gmail came along that I felt comfortable using a Web email system as my main and preferred method of email (I hardly touch Outlook now). That's because Gmail is in the same class of functionality as Outlook, only it has Web-native features such as the ability to check your email from multiple computers.

Some people prefer their Web email systems to mimic the functionality of desktop email systems. Sure it's easier for people to adjust to Web email if it's the same paradigm as desktop email, but the Web era is different in many ways to the PC era and so Web email should reflect that. Gmail was an outstanding attempt at introducing new concepts to Web email and they've largely been successful.

Say what you like about Google's stand-offish nature and perceived arrogance, one thing I admire about Google is that they continually look to disrupt (there's that word again) traditional computing paradigms and markets.

I'm looking forward to the next round of Gmail innovations. Thanks Paul for the great post!