Trends Update: Yelp! iPhone App Features Augmented Reality

What’s Next Is Now Here! Just weeks after we told you to keep watching for AR, it is what’s next, we’re were excited to read on Mashable yesterday about the first mobile application for AR.     Yelp’s latest iPhone app update has a hidden feature that allows users to iPhone users (3Gs only), to shake their phone three times and turn on a view called the “Monocle”.  The Monocle uses the phone’s built in GPS and compass features to let users simply point in any given direction and see an overlay of Yelp content for restaurants, bars and nearby businesses. As we wrote last week, this is a fairly basic but powerful illustration of you can leverage your rich online content to make the travel experience more meaningful…and not to mention infinitely easier! Just imagine being able to walk down a street and pointing your phone at a restaurant, a museum exhibit or anything else for that matter and getting access to a wealth of information about what you’re looking at.

For a video of how this works, check out this video courtesy of our friends at Mashable.

(Watching via email? The video is also here.)