This month, many of my blog posts will be taking a close look at the emerging market for “augmented reality” services and apps that enable you to use your mobile handset to “browse” your immediate surroundings. Augmented reality is an exciting concept for the mobile industry because it opens up the opportunity to provide search and advertising services that are markedly different, and in many ways superior, to those provided by browsing the Internet on a PC in a fixed location.

Augmented reality apps superimpose information pulled from the Internet on to images from your handset’s built-in camera, using contextual data supplied by the mobile network, the device’s built-in GPS chip and compass to determine where you are and in which direction you are looking. For example, the buildings in the handset viewfinder could each be “labelled” with a name tag and a link to relevant information. Touch a label, marked cinema, and up pops information on what films are showing at what times and the cost of tickets, while another label, marked railway station, might show you which trains are departing in the next hour.

Searching the real-world in this way seems more intuitive than firing up your web browser and keying “cinema” or “train times” into Google and then peering at a combination of web sites and Google Maps to get the information you need.

Given the potential for advertising and marketing, it seems likely that nearly all of these augmented reality and services apps will be free in the same way that using a conventional search engine is free, once you have paid your telco for Internet access. So, the big question is how to combine these augmented reality services with advertising and e-commerce in an elegant way that makes sense to the consumer and doesn’t dilute or damage the user experience.

Clean and elegant

In the early days of conventional Internet search, Yahoo! and MSN plastered their search engines with advertising, links to news sites and other popular content. But consumers flocked to Google, which kept its home page clean and only served up adverts and links after the user had entered a search term and Google’s computers knew what they were interested in at that precise moment.

Similarly, consumers aren’t going to want every building they look at through their handset viewfinder to resemble a Formula One racing car, Times Square or Piccadilly Circus. On the other hand, at 7pm, some people would really welcome an advert flagging discounted tickets at a theatre just round the corner or, at midnight, the location of the nearest minicab office.

Augmented reality apps are going to need to provide the consumer with a clean, simple user interface, while also giving them fast links to the information they need, as well as relevant adverts. As in all media, the balance between advertising and editorial needs to be heavily-weighted in favor of the latter. Moreover, apps that understand context, particularly time and personal preferences are absolutely key to unlocking this potentially huge market.