Augmented reality is all the new buzz, I guess. I don’t know, because I only have an iPhone 3G — mine’s missing that important “S” indicating it’s the new model on which augmented reality can actually execute. But at CEATEC today I saw some Sekai Camera examples in the real world.
Yamaha has support for air tags in their new disklavier. This means that you can play a song on your Yamaha disklavier and tag the whole thing. When you look at the area using Sekai Camera, you can see the tag for the song you recorded. Click it, and FingerPiano Share can execute to show you the fingering for that song, allowing you to practice it or play along on your iPhone or iPod Touch.
The demonstration I saw was really neat, and I think this is a really exciting new technology. It introduces a whole lot of wonderful new ways in which we can interact with our world over time (and hopefully paves the way toward the technology that Vernor Vinge posits in his novel Rainbows End). Unfortunately, my experience trying the live demo was less than stellar:
If air tagging really takes off, I can see augmented reality failing before it even starts, as locations get filled up with the augmented versions of “Kilroy was here” graffiti and countless iterations of Chopsticks.