What's the Best Browser For You?
Compare augmented reality browsers before making a decision!
Augmented Reality Browsers offer a new form of location based search that is hard to beat. Using your smartphone camera, you can basically take a picture of stores on a street and get virtual information about what each one sells, specials, and other data. Augmented reality browser apps are sold by several software companies, and some come pre-installed with smartphones.
Reality Browser Makers include:
Wikitude http://www.wikitude.org/
Lazar http://www2.layar.com/
Accrossair: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_mUFS992Cw
Robot Vision http://robotvision.elan3.com/
The advertising market for augmented reality browsers and applications promises to be quite large, considering that conversion rates tend to be many times higher when people are physically standing within a hundred yards of your location. If you can integrate information like waiting times, menu items, specials, and prices, then you can literally grab customers off the street and bring them into your store.
How do augmented reality browsers work? A reality browser combines information from GPS sources, online media companies (and advertisers) and real time information to provide a “virtual reality” view of a street that matches what you have in your smartphone. Other applications use compass, accelerometer, and WiFi data to determine your location and cross reference it with geotagged information to provide you with information about attractions and businesses, or give you complex directions when it comes to finding out-of-the way restaurants, shops, or meeting places. Reality browsers can also be used to point out historic architecture, or create walking tours of interesting areas. The advantage of augmented reality is that it can show the user a picture or an icon matching real places in the same way a tour guide would stop and point out a place where a famous event happened.
Notes and Special Information
Special note: The crowdsourced nature of some browsers may not give you the best information, and you should still consider that advertisements have the same caveats in augmented reality as they do in the real world.