One of my favorite books ever is Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson. It is a sci-fi novel centered around a sword wielding computer hacker that has been extremely influential to many people working with computers today. The word “avatar” in reference to a computer representation of a person was first coined in this book – so just about every major MMO or Virtual Reality system that has come out has been influenced by this book.
Another cool idea from Snow Crash was that of a “gargoyle,” which is basically an individual who is perpetually connected to the net – complete with an eye piece display that enables them pull up information about their surroundings at all time. This is slowly becoming a reality and Yelp is doing their part by bringing the first Augmented Reality app to the iPhone 3GS.
Yelp quietly snuck the feature into their latest update – revealed by shaking your phone 3 times. After that a dialog pops up stating how Yelp thought reality was boring – so they augmented it. From that point on the yelp app displays a monocle option that allows you to use the 3GS’s camera to look around and display yelp information.
Yelp isn’t the first AR app, but they are the first on the iphone. On android based phones – like the G1, there have been other AR apps – in particular that of Layer. Not until the 3GS did the iphone have a compass which is crucial for determining which direction the user is pointing. Even still the iphone was not supposed to see any AR apps until the next release of the iphone OS software – so yelp is being sneaky by releasing it early. Hopefully they aren’t angering the gods over at Apple.
