As part of our count of all the mobile applications that make claim to being ‘augmented reality’ applications we counted over 340 for the iPhone alone. Of those 340 at least 140 are augmented reality browsers that display POIs in the camera view. While we are on course for hitting 200 browsers by the end of the year, its reassuring that some companies are bucking the trend and trying something different. Toozla, a Russian company is one such company who have decided that the camera enabled AR market space is a crowded one and are investigating new ways to deliver content to users.

 

With Toozla there is no map or camera view, instead when you come in range of something interesting Toozla will tell you about it by speaking an overview. If you stick around in the area then Toozla will continue speaking giving you more details about the POI. Toozla users have access to around 171,000 Wikipedia articles which are converted to audio using text to speech technology, and better yet, users are able to record their own reviews of attractions for others so the content will just grow even larger. In addition to the Wikipeda or Wikistreams as they are called, users can subscribe to other ’channels’ such as Tourism, Hotels, or even the Weather and Chat channel.

 

 

Toozla is free and available on a variety of devices, including the iPhone, various Nokia’s, Sony Ericsson’s, and the Palm Treo, which we don’t get to say very often. (full list check here).  Toozla will be available on the Android very soon.