By Jo Bowman, Colin Brown, Neil Jaques, Boyd Farrow, Lucy Fitzgeorge-Parker, Richard Lofthouse, Lee Marshall, Chris Owen, Carlton Reid, John Rumsey, Ross Tieman and Brandon Zatt.

01 THE NEXT... MOBILE REVOLUTION
AUGMENTED REALITY

ILLUSTRATION: MAC FUNAMIZU/petitinvention.wordpress.com

IMAGINE HOLDING up your mobile phone to the scene around you and instantly seeing streams of relevant text and visual data superimposed over the picture. You could see which houses are for sale, where the nearest good restaurants might be together with customer feedback and critic reviews, and whether you have anything in common with that fetching individual by the bar before you make your advances.

If this sounds far-fetched, think again. Augmented Reality, or AR as this nascent technology has already been dubbed, is coming to a smart-phone near you very soon. And, at the moment, most of the pioneering work is being done by European software developers.

Some 125,000 people are said to have downloaded Wikitude, a travel-guide application by Austria’s Mobilizy for G1 handsets powered by Google’s Android software. Nearest Tube, another app, takes advantage of the new compass-enabled iPhone 3GS to point you to the nearest London Underground station. Finland’s Nokia is fine-tuning its first tranche of AR apps and Amsterdam-based Layar’s work includes an ING-sponsored app that allows people to find an ATM simply by pointing their phone camera lenses. At their most rudimentary, such overlays match your GPS coordinates with cloud-sourced data that has been geo-tagged with background information. But it is the next generation of AR technology that is bothexciting – and scaring – the mobile phone community. Combine high-definition resolutions and mind-blowing, face-recognition software with real-time information gleaned from micro-blogging databases and social networks and, presto, you have a tool that will tell everything you want to know, and maybe things you didn’t, about people in your vicinity.

Indeed, you could also have an invasion of privacy battle that will make Google’s legal tussles seem like a virtual stroll in the park.