At BlackBerry World 2011, Research in Motion showcased its new BlackBerry Bold 9900 and a preloaded application called Wikitude. The new Bold is the first BlackBerry to include a magnetic compass and the right display overlay software, meaning it’s capable of augmented reality technology. Wikitude’s main function is the ability to check out geo-positioned Wikipedia articles. For example, pointing your smartphone’s camera at the Eiffel Tower… Read more »

If the thought of blasting TIE fighters as they flew around your backyard had you in a tizzy, then this news should really excite you. Qualcomm has announced that its augmented reality platform is dropping the beta label and is now ready for prime time development. Apart from its own AR SDK, Qualcomm is also making a plug-in for the popular Unity 3D gaming engine… Read more »

For the past year or so people have been talking about augmented reality apps a lot, but to be honest, a lot of those apps have felt like gimmicks. After all, does it really matter if you can hold up your phone’s camera to the real world and see that there are 16 restaurants in the direction you’re pointing? It’s probably easier to find those… Read more »

Word Lens may be one of the coolest mobile apps I’ve ever seen — in theory. Unfortunately it doesn’t work very well right now. But here’s the idea: you point your iPhone camera at a sign or other object with printed text. Word Lens will identify the text, attempt to translate it in real-time, and replace the words on the sign with words in the… Read more »

A few weeks after a teaser video of a new Star Wars game popped up, showing how you can take control of the Millennium Falcon’s guns and shoot up Imperial forces,the game is now available for purchase for $4.99. Normally that wouldn’t catch my attention. There are tens of thousands of games in the app store. What makes Star Wars Arcade: Falcon Runner different is… Read more »

Vertigore plans to release a new Star Wars game for the iPhone and iPod touch before the end of the year which features an awesome looking augmented reality mode. Basically, you flip on AR, and instead of playing against a fictional space backdrop, Star Wars Arcade: Falcon Gunner will let you blast TIE fighters flying across real world environments. Really, the app just replaces the… Read more »

Windows Phone 7 may be the sexiest new mobile operating system Microsoft has released since, well, Pocket PC 2000. But while it has a slick new interface, an excellent new browser, and other compelling features, it lacks some of the features Windows Mobile users have grown used to over the past decade. That includes copy and paste support, multitasking, and easily removable storage. Developers are… Read more »

Yelp has released a major update to its mobile restaurant search and review app for Google Android. Like the original Yelp app, Yelp 2.0 for Android lets you search for businesses based on your location, read reviews, bookmarks sites, and do pretty much everything you can do on the Yelp web site except for writing reviews (because Yelp doesn’t want short messages filled with typos)…. Read more »

Layar’s Reality Browser is an augmented reality app for Android and iPhone that lets you find real-world stuff by looking through you’re phone’s camera. Basically, you point your phone in a direction and choose the layer you want to use, and Reality Browser will show you icons for nearby restaurants, Twitter users, or just about anything else that can be plotted geographically. Today Layar is… Read more »