Augmented Reality and Libraries (Plus QR codes & Foursquare)

Augmented Reality (AR) is a technology concept that I personally find to be really cool, and full of potential for many aspects of life, including library work. Here is how Wikipedia explains AR http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augmented_reality . The most common example you might be familiar with is any of those applications for smart phones that allow you to interact with the real world via the camera and view screen. The phone's camera captures the images of your nearby surroundings, and compares this with the gps and directional data from your phone's sensors (so phone knows where you are, and what direction you're looking). Based on this data, compared with the data entered about nearby restaurants, virtual data is inserted on top of the image that your phone is capturing. So if you're looking for restaurants, and your phone's camera 'sees' a nearby Wendy's, there might be a virtual tag "Wendy's" on the image showing on your view screen. It will probably be a while before we get the sensitivity to tag individual ranges in a library, but imagine someday you walk into a library, search the online catalog to see if they have a particular item, and then using your phone, you see markings, or a line projected on the carpet leading you to that item. In the mean time, there are ways of at least getting libraries on the AR map. Here is a link to a blog by a librarian that I found interesting. It not only covers AR, but also QR codes and Geolocation. http://strangelibrarian.org/2010/01/geolocation-augmented-reality-qr-codes-libraries/ Obviously this posting is more than a year old, but I liked the ground it covered, as well as the ideas suggested for using this tech in libraries.