We watch a lot of gadget and tech videos on a weekly basis, an awful lot. This one takes the gold medal for this week though – Sony demonstrating a brand new type of Augmented Reality for smartphones called SmartAR.
SmartAR doesn’t require a “trigger” card to start the Augmented Reality, like how the Nintendo 3DS requires that little playing card that comes in the box. In the video Sony demonstrate how the AR character can walk around in a set space, without the need for it to be attached to any sort of card.
We’re really impressed with how the character can be increased in size, presumably through an app on the Sony Ericsson phone we see right at the start of the video. It’s also pretty impressive how fast the flat surface can be moved around without affecting the AR character at all.
We’d bet our house on Sony planning to implement this into the NGP (that’s the next generation of PSP, planned for release later this year). With Nintendo already having an Augmented Reality-capable portable on the market in the form of the 3DS, we’d imagine Sony would want to go one better. This advance in AR technology could make for some very interesting and intuitive games indeed.
We absolutely love the video, so we’d like to hear your thoughts on it too! Leave us a comment, or if you’re a tweeter, tweet us @Gadget_Helpline on Twitter.