Augmented Reality Phones are becoming more commonplace as cameras become more sensitive and processers become fast enough to handle 3D imaging and processing routines necessary to create digital markups of real world landscapes. Furthermore, smartphones with AR capabilities have accelerometers, compasses, GPS, and WiFi location based hardware that are necessary to turn ordinary images into virtual reality locators.
Recent improvements in the Android operating system, and newly announced features on the Apple iPhone 4 point to a wide range of AR capabilities beyond what people are using today. The beauty of AR phone apps is that open source development lets people create new and useful augmented reality phone tools that could add a new dimension to the world around us. Imagine a building inspector marking up virtual areas for a 3D report, or a geologist marking out a claim with a handheld phone that is available to anyone for a few hundred dollars. 3G and 4G features are being optimized to allow for more data augmentation than ever before. As mobile processers increase capacity and throughput, the AR world is going to be more and more comparable to the real one, so artificial intelligence applications may be able to provide you with still greater information about your everyday world, or people can create virtual maps that only you can follow to find your buried treasure.