Floating around on Twittersphere this morning is a very interesting article on the augmented reality hype cycle. (read here)

The article that breaks down the technology in to 4 stages:

• Level 0 -- Physical World Hyper Linking
• Level 1 -- Marker Based AR
• Level 2 -- Markerless AR
• Level 3 -- Augmented Vision

Right now we are around level 2 with mobile applications beginning to use markerless AR. A good example or markerless AR is the Wikitude application for the Google Android G1 device.

It looks like a great application if you are a traveller.

Wikitude
Wikitude is a mobile travel guide for the Android platform based on location-based Wikipedia and Qype content. It is a handy application for planning a trip or to find out about landmarks in your surroundings; 350,000 world-wide points of interest may be searched by GPS or by address and displayed in a list view, map view or cam view.

Wikitude AR Travel Guide Part 1

Wikitude AR Travel Guide Part 2

More
Application home page
Install from here

At the moment the Google Android device appears to be hogging all the augmented reality limelight. With some of the new super powerful Symbian based devices coming out later this year I hope all that will change.

Have you used it?
If you have used the Wikitude application? I’m sure we’d all be intrested in hearing more

Related posts you may like:

1. Augmented Reality Driving Applications
2. Heavens Above Augmented Reality
3. 87 Layers And Counting
4. Wikitude 4 For The Android With Video
5. Layar, The World’s First Augmented Reality Browser
6. Google Enter The Augmented Reality World
7. Augmented Tourisum