If you see want to see what a new sofa and armchairs would look like in your lounge, an iPhone app from metaio enables you to do exactly that, by integrating 3D images of furniture into a picture of your home. The iLiving app let's you move the furniture around, change its size or rotate it, while shaking the iPhone will randomly shuffle the sofa and chairs within the picture.  You can then take a screenshot of your preferred look and send it to your family to get their reaction.

ILiving is a good example of a specialised augmented reality app that a retailer, such as Ikea, might want to brand, market and distribute. Metaio, a seven-year old company based in Munich, offers to develop white-label apps or supply a software developer kit (SDK), which enables third-parties to use its image recognition technology to develop their own augmented reality apps for Symbian and Windows Mobile devices, as well as the iPhone.

Fixated on 3D

Unsurprisingly, given its heritage supplying industrial design software to many of the big car makers, Metaio defines augmented reality as displaying interactive 3D content in a real environment, rather than just adding tags and labels to the video stream in your camera phone's viewfinder. The company uses both markers and 2D texture tracking techniques to try and ensure the 3D object appears to remain fixed in the same place even as the viewer moves around it.

Metaio's fixation on 3D images is also evident in the design of its junaio iPhone app, a platform that enables users and developers to create their own augmented reality content and publish it to the real world. The home page of the junaio web site prominently displays screen shots of the avatars, cartoon dinosaurs and cats, military helicopters and other objects that its users have created and then added to a video stream of their office, home or another location.

This content is visible to other Junaio users in the viewfinder of their iPhone 3GS. Metaio says an Android version of Junaio is coming soon and Jan Schlink, a spokesman for the company, says version 2.0 of the app will have filter mechanisms, so that you will be able to type in a user name and see just their posts.

Augmented Vision

Metaio's ultimate goal is for junaio to provide "augmented vision", enabling users to view 3D images very precisely registered at a specific location in the real-world, so you could, for example, walk right round a dinosaur and view it from every angle.  

Mr. Schlink says the accuracy of the GPS data that your iPhone uses to determine your location is generally between 10 and 20 metres, making it difficult to tightly-register an image in one place. For that, he notes, you need to use image recognition software, which is not yet supported by the Apple handset.  You also need lots of processing power - effective image recognition that will work in a wide variety of circumstances is a high-end computing challenge requiring lots of sophisticated algorithms and data-crunching. But, as handset hardware and software improves, mobile augmented vision will eventually become a reality.

How the technology will be applied in practice and monetised is limited only by your imagination. "We still do not know where this is going," says Mr. Schlink. But developers will surely want to use augmented vision to create both highly-immersive games and advertising that combine the real world with sophisticated 3D imagery. For example, when you walk into an upmarket shopping mall, you might be prompted to open your junaio app to view a 3D image of a Versace dress or the latest Star Wars Lego model apparently floating in mid-air. If you like the look of the front, you can walk round and take a look at the back.

Initially, you might feel a little self-conscious studying objects that would be invisible to passersby, but we used to feel self-conscious making a mobile phone call in a public place. Not any more.