I ran an interesting workshop at Mobile World Congress for people interested in augmented reality. The topic, should I build a plug-in for another application or write my own application came up along with how do I make money? So what are the pros and cons of each and is there a 3rd better way?

Recently Nokia launched Ovi Maps Racing for Nokia Symbian^1 handsets. The idea behind the game is that you use your current location to create a track around where you are using Ovi Maps, and then you can race around, trying to set the fastest lap times.

Layar was pulled from the appstore a month or so back but makes it's return with version 3.0. An update with new 3D layers. Has it been worth the wait? Layar fans may want to skip today's blog and get themselves a cup of coffee.

Today's augmented reality games are a fun affair, shoot a few aliens, blow up a few planes, or put out a few fires all from the comfort for your own home. The only danger is banging your knee on a table as you turn around. But as technology gets more sophisticated and graphics get better, what are the implications of augmented reality games, will the technology make them to hot to handle?

Mobile World Congress was as usual a top event. This year there was a big AR theme including the augmented reality workshop that I ran at the Mobile Jam. Some really cool highlights include, TAT Augmented ID is no longer dream, face recognition is here and working on mobile devices.Mobilizy storm the NAVTEQ Challenge awards and are worthy winners with Wikitude drive. Oh and details of the next Augmented Planet event - coming soon to a city near you? perhaps!

Say augmented reality to any iPhone owner and they'll say Wikitude or Layar. A detailed scan through the appstore shows there are more browsers than any other category of mobile augmented reality application. We continue the ultimate guide to iPhone augmented reality and focus on the augmented reality browser. Are there any threats to the Wikitude crown? What's hot and what's not.

Building augmented reality applications presents developers with a unique challenge. How do you build a user interface that presents a large amount of data to users, data that needs to reflect distance and location, and may have multiple data in the same location. Visually laying out that data is challenging. We look at some of the unique approaches some developers are taking to solve this problem.

iDRNAVI is a multifunctional drive-recorder that displays GPS data, acceleration, speed. Its also a GPS logger, will record up to 120 minutes of video and should you have a crash it will email the impact to any email address you specify. With a description and functionality like that it was just begging to be installed and tested. But is it as good as it sounds?

We continue to look at every augmented reality iPhone application available in the Apple appstore. Today we look at navigation.

Augmented reality is the latest greatest craze, but is it good? Are we sharing to much information with the world and leaving ourselves open for exploitation in the future? What are the negatives and when will AR come back and bite us on the arse. Ban it now before it's to late. The case against augmented reality.

Now is a good time to be thinking about releasing an augmented reality application, but what's out there in the appstore already? Searching the appstore for 'augmented reality' used to produce a single page of results, these days there are hundreds of apps all fighting for your attention and hard earned pennies. We thought we would take a look and see what applications are available. Welcome to part one of the ultimate guide to iPhone augmented reality applications.