Intel Demos Augmented Reality App at IDF

Bored with your reality? Why not augment  it? The promise of “augmented reality” is that, like a Terminator robot, you can look at someone or something and quickly gain additional information about it that is displayed next to its image.

While nobody’s planning to offer glowing red eyes, in recent months, we’ve heard a lot about augmented reality being the next killer application for mobile devices. But so far we haven’t seen many apps that work.

Browsing through the displays in the Mobile Internet Devices area at the Intel Developer Forum, we found  a demo of augmented reality technology. Using a present-day Compal-branded MID, an Intel rep showed us how one can take pictures of an object and then query those images against an online database to get more information on the object.

As an example, we were shown how to take a photo of  San Francisco’s Transamerica Pyramid on the Compal MID, then send that photo to the Internet for recognition, and get back series of links to Wikipedia articles on the pyramid.

Intel’s demo is just that and no working product is planned. However, we can imagine augmented reality being used not only to identify buildings and landmarks, but also to photograph products at the store and get online reviews of them, to photograph people and get their names, or to photograph food and get its nutritional info.

To get a better idea of how Intel’s augmented reality app works, check out our hands-on video below.