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Augmented Reality is looking to explode into our lives and change how we experience…well…almost everything. But the real power will come when Augmented Reality converges with other emerging technologies.

If you can barely handle the reality you have, you better hang on to your id, superego, and basic hold on the world. Here comes Augmented Reality and it looks to change a how we relate to everything around us. At its core, Augmented Reality isn’t that weird of a concept. It basically means that you take a real video or image and you overlay computer generated images. We’ve seen this in movies, commercials and advertising for years. Heck, I can do this on my Mac without too much trouble.

Where it starts to resemble something that would have made Gene Roddenberry proud is when you start adding technologies like mobile, GPS and the power of the internet to give you instant, personally relevant information.  For example, a company called Layar created an application that lets you look at city streets through the view finder in your mobile phone and overlays icons of local shopping, restaurants and point of interest. So, if you’re hungry, pull out your phone, pan the street and look for the pizza and hamburger icons to lead you to lunch.

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Three short years ago Apple changed the rules when they opened up their phones to the universe, letting third party vendors write programs. Although there were technically apps before that, developers and companies were free to develop their own, branded apps on iPhones platform (something virtually unheard of at the time). Since then, over two hundred and twenty five thousand of those handy little programs are in Apple’s App Store alone (and that’s not counting places like the Android Market and Blackberry App World). The market isn’t slowing any time soon. According to a recent Nielsen report on mobile apps, smart phones are expected to overtake feature phones in the U.S. by 2011. You can now do anything with apps from manage your bank account to put a voodoo curse on your boss. I can almost see Apple’s campaign slogan “There’s an app for that” on a Trivial Pursuit Pop Culture edition. At first, this just looks like an “App-A-Lanche” of mind boggling amounts of new programs crushing into the market. But take a closer look, and you can see that there has been a impressive evolution in the app world.

Early apps were very simple. They were like single-cell programs, letting you calculate a tip or see what time it was in China. Not many frills, and conventions were still being hammered out. Developers were like nervous teenagers on a date, not sure how far to push things. Should they charge for apps? Should they give them away for free? How complex should they be? Apple had given them they keys to the iPhone Ferrari, and they weren’t sure where to go. As developers got more comfortable with this new medium and companies and start-ups started waking up to their potential, these simple apps soon began to multiply. Apple also helped things by opening the App Store in July 2008 and allowing users to download apps directly to their iPhones (ten million apps were downloaded the first weekend the App Store was opened). From July 2008 to January 2009 the Apple App Store went from 500 apps to 15,000. (more…)

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