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About to pull the trigger on the new iPhone purchase. Finally. For the past year or two I've been feeling like the tech world has been stagnating, but now just lately, for me, I feel another surge coming on. And the iPhone and the various Google Android handsets are leading the charge. What I'm excited about is being called "augmented reality" and I think it's going to be a big deal.
The phrase is a play on "virtual reality" which was a popular thing to fantasize about around the time I became interested in computer technology (early nineties.) The idea is that through equipment like a head mounted display (i.e., goggles with computer screens instead of lenses) we would create entire 3D worlds that people could interact with. William Gibson's Neuromancer was the canonical text for describing such a thing, and Jaron Lanier was the main evangelist.
Augmented reality is similar, except the computer generated world is overlaid on the real world. It turns out this is a much more useful idea. And the inclusion of video cameras, GPS, and magnetometers in these handsets allows for some really new breakthrough applications to be built. Our phone now knows where you are on the earth, and what direction you are pointing the phone. Hold it up like a third eye, with the video camera on (doesn't need to be recording - that may turn out to be a seldom used function of the camera!) and it sees what you are seeing - only it can overlay information on the screen.
Point your phone/camera/third eye at something and these new apps can figure out what it is and tell you. Check out the videos in the first "augmented reality" link. Okay, you've got to use your imagination, but this is some seriously cool stuff. In short, I'm excited again. I couldn't see it for a while, but this is the next big step.
On a side note: in my little game I play watching the stock market - I guess like some people follow a sports team - I've started rooting for ARM (ticker: armh). I think Intel has missed a bit with Atom and the ARM A9 Cortext (the heart of the iPhone) is going to be tough to catch. At $6.30 it's up a bit in the last week but still pretty cheap.