Startups looking to make money by enhancing reality | VentureBeat

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Startups looking to make money by enhancing reality

July 3, 2009 | Kim-Mai Cutler

Augmented reality (AR) technology , which overlays 3-D graphics or information over a live camera feed, isn’t a brand-new idea. But now that smartphones are penetrating the mass market, AR may be on the cusp of wide adoption.

Imagine traveling to a foreign country, pointing your camera at a building and having it up pull up a trove of historical information, video and images of the place over the past century.

Two early AR services are SPRXMobile’s Layar (in the Netherlands) and Tonchidot’s Sekai Camera (in Japan), which dig up real estate, job listings or user-generated tags when you point an Android-based phone or iPhone at buildings.

Gaming companies are using augmented reality technology by building 3-D animations that appear on screen for games that interact with a player’s physical surrounding. There are a few examples floating around like this one of an augmented reality, zombie-killing game from Georgia Tech , although few are in commercial use yet.

Other areas of augmented reality, like marketing and promotions, are a bit gimmicky, especially since most seem to rely on Web cams or stationary video cameras and are not compatible with smartphones yet. For sales applications of augmented reality, the eventual idea would be to walk down a store aisle, point the camera on your phone at a box and see an animation related to what’s inside.

There’s been a lot of startup activity in this space of late. Here’s a look at the various contenders (by the way, be sure to take a look at our coverage today of the AR community’s effort to get Apple to open up the iPhone to AR apps):

The AR Browsers

Layar is an Android-based, augmented reality browser from Dutch ...

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