Popular travel book publisher Lonely Planet has begun selling Augmented Reality apps for 10 US cities for $5 each in the Android Marketplace. The apps were built in conjunction with Mobilizy, the company behind user generated content AR app Wikitude.
In addition to offering Lonely Planet content overlayed on top of locations you view through your phone’s camera view, you can also plan itineraries and get step by step directions from the app. Augmented Reality is a technology in a formative stage but support from the Lonely Planet brand is a big, if unsurprising, step.
Will consumers go for it? GoMoNews is skeptical, pointing out that AR technology is still clumsy and Lonely Planet’s offering is very limited so far. National Geographic’s travel blog voices no such concerns.
Travel is the most logical application of consumer-focused Augmented Reality, but we expect a large number of consumer and marketing companies to explore this new paradigm of layering data on top of the viewed world.
Some of the most interesting applications of Augmented Reality are outside the consumer market; AR could prove very useful for medical procedures or mechanical repair, for example. The technology remains limited, though, by the inability of most applications to process live video of what they are actually looking at, instead of merely offering up data based on what’s believed to be in a given GPS position.
