What Ship? Point iPhone to Find Out

iPhone app can enable ship identification with augmented reality

Augmented reality covers the many ways of adding digital information to the real world around us, usually by adding on-screen flags to the video feed from a smartphone’s camera. It’s clever and very futuristic, but you can still try it out now easily, says Kit Eaton in a 'The New York Times' article.

To identify a ship, for example, a free app, 'Layar' , which can pull in many different sources of augmented information can be used, pulling in data from Vesseltracker.com , which has up-to-date location information about ships in its database.

The Layar app knows where the observer is standing and which way the phone is pointing, so all that is necessary is to direct it at the ship.

A handy flag then appears above the ship’s image on-screen and one can read most of the ship's particulars.

Click here to acccess the Layer app.