hmm, now i got thinking about street signs with ir 2d barcodes that allow a computer to look up the sign online and overlay a image of it in your native language, thanks to other ir markers in the corners to get the orientatioon right.

watch gits:sac and see how barcodes are displayed next to or replace text...

How about this

http://www.linuxfordevices.com/c/a/News/PABRcom-WXHMD/

http://www.vuzix.com/iwear/products_camar.html

biggest problem there is that you loose the ability to have everything in focus at the same time.

what i would love to see is those new LG or samsung transparent LED screens, with a camera aligned in the direction of the view (so that you line up a crosshair/mark of some sort to photo something).

that way, you can create a subtext or overlay, without having to convert everything into video like current android/iphone AR do it.

"see through" displays are great for glasses (hmd) or car windshields, but I fear in a handheld the field of view is a problem. Much better to display an image and overlay things there. Not only you can use a a larger FOV, but you don't force the user to hold the thing right ahead of him, and you can also guarantee the artificial overlay will be properly aligned to the objects being displayed.

Think about small camcorders... Today the trend is having an lcd display that you can move around. It's much more comphortable. But I repeat: see-through AR displays have their place in the HMD world.

Here's an approach to doing a semi-augmented reality approach with IKEA: http://mobilebehavior.com/2009/12/01...d-reality-app/

The lessons learned here should be sufficient enough for anyone looking to do augmented reality apps with Maemo, and what kinds of education that would need to go along with the application/service itself.

is it possible to port Layar to the n900?

Looks like it's closed source so you'd need to ask the app developers. It does look rather cool though - nice to have a single app that can combine multiple sets of overlay data.

I wonder if we could reverse engineer the layer data and write our own app to do this (obviously no compass is a pita, but proof of concept and all).

In fact it might not even need to be reverse engineered as there's a developer page here: http://layar.pbworks.com/w/page/7783228/FrontPage

Right, I just had a play with Layar on my wife's old Android phone, and it does seem to be quite cool.

like most augmented reality apps, Layar uses a compass, which we don't have on our N900s.
so even if somebody were to port it, it wouldn't be of much use.