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Realities of the Reality Layer
by Andrew McCaskey
The Mobile Killer App: Only As Good As..
It’s been billed as the final integration of all of the great gadgets that have been crammed into the mobile phone. Companies in Austria and the Netherlands have launched, with heavy weight support from the likes of Nokia and IBM to supply an additional data driven visual layer to cellphone video and camera.
This so-called ‘Reality Layer’ would project information onto the camera view – but since it is mounted within the mobile phone and has location knowledge from GPS and orientation information from accelerometers. The only problem that I see is ‘who’s reality’ ? While the technology is converging nicely, the data that could be applied to a given situation or view is subject to a LOT of selective editing.
For example, consider the real estate application – look at a house that is for sale through your mobile phone viewfinder, and if you have the “real estate reality plug in”, you’d see the home’s listed price, taxes, particulars on schools, distance and direction to shopping. You would however, see a selective slice of reality. It probably would not give you information on drug busts, breakins, local crimes, transient tenents or other information that might be highly useful in the housing decision.
The Killer App is going to be truly killer only if the “reality layer” isn’t the Disney version of the data that needs to be seen. Even if reality is not a pretty as you would like.
Killer App for Mobile Phones- The Reality Layer
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