Over the past week or two there has been an awful lot of noise about "Augmented Reality" applications for the iPhone. You might be asking what such an application is - the answer is simple. What the gaming community has known as a HUD for years is now being called augmented reality. There is a reason for this name change however. A HUD is traditionally statistics about the user - it is information which is gathered and displayed for the user, however with augmented reality the overlay interacts with the environment.
The best way to describe this is with an example. Let's consider TwittARound, and application which is being worked on which will show people tweeting in real-time as an overlay to a video feed from your iPhone's camera. This means you can see where these people are tweeting from in relation to where you are. The same people behind that application are also working on an AR tourism application for overlaying historic photographs.
Another team of developers has been working on acrossair - an AR application for finding the nearest tube station. Apparently this one is currently awaiting approval from Apple for it to enter the App Store. If it does get approved it will be the first AR application to make it there after the SDK does not include a live API for manipulating live videos.
If either of these applications are accepted or Apple's stance on AR applications changes then we're going to see some truly amazing applications hitting the App Store in the coming months.
