Welcome to the amazing new world of  augmented reality (AR)! It is just like regular reality, except that it presents useful information as an overlay to the regular-old reality in the world around you. Case in point: Wikitude World Browser, which acts as a worldwide points of interest (POI) collector with additional intelligence to match those points to your particular GPS location.  It works in conjunction with the camera function on S60 5th Edition devices such as my Nokia N97, and with the GPS functions of the device. The net result is that, when you call up the camera function from within the Wikitude app, you see the photo that you would take with the camera function, plus overlays of the POI information within the field of view of your camera.

For example, I fired up Wikitude at my home in San Francisco, California. As part of the application initialization process, it asked me to twist and turn my Nokia N97 device, so that it could get a fix on my location and the relative orientation of the device. Then, it started finding local points of interest. I pointed it out through the back window of my house, and it located the nearby Crissy Field Fishing Pier. I pointed it out through the window to enhance the GPS location accuracy, but it turned out that it also worked when I kept the Nokia N97 inside the house.  At first, a little tag appeared that said “Crissy”, and when I touched the tab, it opened up to the info window that told me that the Crissy Field Fishing Pier was 6.76 km from my house, and the round compass icon in the lower right of the screen showed me in which direction I should go to get there.

Taking the Nokia N97 to the front of my house, Wikitude found that the University of San Francisco was the nearest POI in that direction (4.67 km).

Looking east towards downtown San Francisco

Instead of going all the way to Crissy Field, I stopped off at the vista point overlooking the famous Golden Gate bridge, figuring that there should be a number of POIs visible from there.

Sure enough, there were about a dozen POI tags within the field of view of my camera as I pointed it eastward and northward from the southern vista point.  I could reduce that number by searching for something specific, such as ‘restaurant’, ‘museum’, ‘university’, or ‘pier’.   The screen below shows the categories of tags that one might want to use as filters.

Filters on POI tags that you can apply to Wikitude World Browser

In the photo below, I had tapped on the tag marked ‘San Francisco Opera’ to get more information.

Dozens of tags looking north across the San Francisco bay

First, I should apologize to the San Francisco chamber of commerce for choosing a particularly foggy and cold day to represent this fair city, but that was the way it was. Secondly, I should apologize for not getting a clean screen snap, but since the Wikitude World Browser uses the same calls as the Best Screen Snap application on my Nokia N97, I had to use an external camera to show the screen contents. To the real eyeball, the tags and metadata were perfectly clear.

Details on Sausalito, looking north across the Golden Gate bridge

Pointing the camera northward, I saw the tags for the Golden Gate bridge and Fort Point, as well as expanding the info for Sausalito, the town at the north end of the bridge where Alfred Hitchcock’s classic movie ‘The Birds’ was filmed.

The more POI information that people put into the Wikitude database, the more valuable it becomes. Already in Europe, there is quite a network of POI information that has been placed by consumers into the database, and this database is just beginning to grow in America. Overall, the Wikitude World Browser can access over 350,000 POI tags. It draws its information from Wikipedia.org, Wikitude.me, and Qype.

Wikitude World Browser was created by Mobilizy GmbH of Salzburg, Austria, a creative group of developers who just won the Grand Prize at the NAVTEQ 2010 Global LBS Challenge/EMEA for a related product, Wikitude Drive, which has a navigation system and text-to-speech features.

Here you can watch a quick demo of Wikitude World Browser on a Nokia Symbian device:

The Wikitude World Browser application is available as a free download in Ovi Store.