Another small step toward Mobile AR

This article on cnn.com paints a nice path toward the eventual deployment of handheld AR games.  Right now, they are not doing AR, just geolocated content, but by focusing on devices and concepts that require magnetic compasses in the phones, they will hopefully help push manufacturers toward creating devices with full 3d orientation sensors.  Again, as the article points out, we need both position (good GPS, better than currently available), a good compass AND tilt/roll sensing (full 3D orientation) to know "where you are looking."

Eventually, 3D position and orientation like this will just be the starting point, and the devices will use other information in the world (models of buildings, such as this system demonstrates, or the imaged-based approaches being worked on by Nokia Palo Alto researchers).  When such systems (which will require a massive amount of information about the real world, much more significant that systems like Google Earth and Google Streetview) are deployed, we can finally start doing REAL AR in the physical world.

Some day, some day ...