Our thoughts on Augmented Reality published in NETT Magazine

The March edition of NETT Magazine is out and this month contains a feature on Augmented Reality. We were interviewed for the feature to provide our thoughts as iPhone and Android developers.

Digging beneath the (shiny) surface

Daniel Bradby is co-founder of jTribe (jtribe.com.au), a mobile apps development company for iPhone and Android. He is also excited about the prospects of augmented reality.

"We've been looking at bringing static, physical geo-located information to life with augmented reality, such as animating a billboard, " he says. "Obviously , you can add things like a game or a giveaway, to get the user to engage in the product or brand itself, as opposed to a static piece of advertising that they just take in."

He believes there are many interesting applications beyond marketing, though many of these fall into specific niches.

"I work with architects and urban planners and the Victorian Government is interested in getting their geographic system information onto the phone," he says. "You could provide good information for architects and planners, to augment what they're looking at with planning information on top, such as zoning or heritage listing of a property."

However, Apple's restrictions on augmented reality applications on the iPhone are holding the technology back.

"The iPhone platform's way of offering augmented reality is allowing you to overlay animation over the current video source," he explains. "You can't process that video that's coming in and saying 'I recognise that shape and I'm going to overlay information on that'."