I first learned about Augumented Reality (AR) when a friend of mine gave me a sneak peak at his AR startup VC-ready presentation. I was, at first, totally overwhelmed by the entire concept of AR, but once it was broken down for me, I started to realize that AR will truly shape the future of how we see the world. Wikipedia has a pretty simplistic, albeit rather bland, definition of AR…

Augmented reality (AR) is a field of computer research which deals with the combination of real-world and computer-generated data (virtual reality), where computer graphics objects are blended into real footage in real time.

A First Glimpse at What is to Come

In a recent piece I wrote for Mashable, I blogged about how to make the most out of Google Maps. In doing research for mobile tools, I found the first application that actually has me jealous of Android phones—Wikitude AR Travel Guide, an AR mobile app for Android.

It’s dead simple and yet oh so powerful. Phones with the Android OS can use their camera as a lens to see beyond the surface of the real-wold view. When you point your camera in any direction, you’ll see the actual view with a layer of Wikipedia location-based content specific to your view of the world. The video below demonstrates just how cool (and powerful) the app really is.

This is Going to be Huge

This is just the beginning for AR. As more AR-ready devices are released to the public, you’ll begin to see a whole new view of the world—virtual data in actual life. Just image having your camera, camera phone, video device, or AR enabled sunglasses (that would be kinda neat) combine the actual world with a custom view of your already established online presence. You could be walking around seeing your social graph as an added visual layer to the phsyical world you already know and love. At the very least, AR could solve the relativley new problem of never being able to remember someone’s Twitter name. Think SecondLife, but substitute your real physical world—a true merging of your online and offline identities. Exciting…and a tad scary.

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