The Best New Travel Technology

Your Reality, Augmented

Imagine if your phone could use GPS information and a compass to lead you to the nearest restaurant or cash machine. In fact, it already can: welcome to "augmented reality", or AR, a technology that overlays digital information on a real-world view, typically using your mobile phone's camera and screen.

"Point your phone at a building and see its history or look at a painting and see the Grove Dictionary article on it. In 2010, this revolution in travel information is just beginning," says James Governor, an industry analyst with Redmonk.

Mobile phone AR apps Layar (www.layar.eu) and Wikitude World Browser (www.wikitude.org) are already out there, serving up travel information from the likes of Spotted by Locals (www.spottedbylocals.com), Yelp! (www.yelp.co.uk) and social game Noticings (www.noticin.gs)

Lastminute.com was among the first travel companies to experiment with the technology. "We think AR will take a significant chunk of the market in time," says Marko Balabanovic at Lastminute.com. "What we've seen so far are the primitive beginnings, and there will be massive improvements over the next two years. Our goal, with apps such as Nru and Snaffle, is to enable "n-commerce", where "n" stands for "nearby" – showing customers great things to do nearby, right now, with real-time availability, and a great selection of deals."

By the end of this year, expect to see traditional travel publishers pushing their content through to us, hotel chains superimposing their latest offers over your real-time street view, and perhaps travellers using AR as a social space to share experiences and advice with other visitors.

The Android-iPhone Shoot-out

This year will be the year we do a lot more miles on our mobiles. For travellers, it's all about the applications, or "apps", easy-to-use mini-programs that run on your phone handset. An app can find you on a map, point you to local restaurant reviews, remember where you parked your car, or even replace your guidebook. More than three billion have gone out of the doors in just 18 months from Apple's App Store, many free to download. "As long as roaming costs can be limited, a mobile is ideal for destination information, for booking hotels and for companies providing services to travellers already in the destination," says Alex Bainbridge at TourCMS.

Apple won't have it all its own way this year. We'll hear a lot more from Google's Android mobile operating system, which is available free for phone hardware manufacturers to install. Several new handsets from Sony Ericsson, Motorola, HTC, Samsung and Google itself (the Nexus One) are Android-powered. The Android Market, the equivalent of the iPhone's App Store, opened with 50 apps in October 2008; there are now more than 15,000, including phrase books and guides from Lonely Planet. It's also possible that Microsoft's new mobile phone software, Windows Phone 7 series, will make a big splash when it's released towards the end of this year.

"Our hope is that the next big application – the future YouTube or Facebook – will be built for mobiles," says Stephany van Willigenburg at Google Travel.

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Source: Telegraph


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