It’s a gift that was once the preserve of fictional cyborgs.

Call it Terminator Vision – a view of the world tagged with rich, location-relevant information whilst your gaze flickers here and there. But now this Augmented Reality (AR), as it is known, is materialising in the real world.

Mobile phone operators, at least, are hoping it will be the next big thing as programmers learn to corral all the bells and whistles of smart phones – GPS, video, accelerometers – into “killer applications”. For the first time such AR is available for handsets.

Via the video function of a mobile phone’s camera it is now possible to combine a regular pictorial view with added data from the internet just as the fictional Terminator was able to overlay its view of the world with vital information about its surroundings.

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