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What geocaching is to the physical treasure hunt, Aurasma should be to the virtual one. With Aurasma, the treasure isn’t physical – it exists only in the digital world. Take your iPad with you around town and check out the app to find locations near you where Auras can be found.

Once you’ve found a location, look at it with your iPad and the app to see an augmented reality surprise, which could be anything from an e-greeting to a picture to an animated video.

For example, friends could create greetings and put them in the front of your house. You’ll be able to see them by going outside and looking at your house using the app. You can create Auras, too, either for friends or the general public to go out and discover for themselves.

Adding realism to AR by using real world surrounding information (HDRs panoramas, IBLs) is a thing we all want to have sooner than later! We have seen a cool demo of Suomi’s VTT on this, where they fake the surrounding information using the background and scanning a ping pong ball for lighting information. Now we have another candidate porting a similar approach to our beloved mobile devices. The paper of the University of Münster (Germany) has been published already in 2004 (titled “Virtual Reflections for Augmented Reality Environments”), but now it’s time to hit the mobile world with it!

If you are interested in some tech talk, please read on! :-) Their approach can create CubeMaps for all reflective or lighting purposes in real-time using only the information from the background video frame: they not only flip and stitch the frame six times and mirrored together, but do a pretty smart estimation, that yields in plausible neat-looking reflections (although obviously fake): they project six regions of the background frame (see below) onto the new six sides of a Cube. The general idea is to have reasonable regions to map from

This way they get to simulate glossy and diffuse reflections already. Lighting/shadow influence will probably be the next step, since the CubeMap is already there…

Metaio thinks that tablets will become increasingly important devices for AR, describing them as "the perfect enabler for augmented reality" as it published a video showcasing its Junaio AR technology running on slate devices.

Metaio's bullishness is about more than just the iPad: the company thinks the new wave of tablets running Google's Android 3.0 operating system – starting with the Motorola Xoom – will create new opportunities for innovative AR applications.

It also cites dual-core processors as a key factor enabling tablets to be used for AR applications including instructional guides; product information; e-commerce; entertainment and gaming

Now Mobilizy, the leaders in augmented reality geo-location applications for mobile have taken the next major leap by combining augmented reality with GPS navigation software. Wikitude Drive is the award winning GPS navigation application for Android devices, it has already been awarded numerous prizes including the “Galileo Master 2010” of the European Satellite Navigation Competition, “Global Champion” of the NAVTEQ LBS Challenge and Winner of the “World Summit Award 2010”. Previously available for Austria, Germany and Switzerland the application is now available for Spain, UK, France and Italy. What’s different about Wikitude Drive from other navigation applications is it overlays the live route over the camera feed rather than using a traditional map view.  This new augmented reality view enables you to see exactly where you are going and the route without having to take your eyes off the road ahead. Having said sometime back that someday AR will change navigation, it’s been enjoyable playing around with the beta and testing the UK maps. As everything is stored on the server all the maps are up to date and I was even able to navigate to my house which hasn’t even made Google Street View yet. Turn by turn instructions are given clearly using a speech engine so you’ll always have the expected voice instructions.

A new app in this field is TagWhat. Part augmented reality-app and part social networking service, it lets people check and view locations along with additional random info like the place's history, the famous people who lived in it, anecdotes about the neighboring establishments, or any other information that can either be trivial, interesting, or extremely useful.

The fun, friendly user interface allows you to tag pictures, locations, as well as include your own stories and musings about a place, or even include multimedia like a video of a famous event that happened in a location, or a famous song that was written in an establishment.

What differentiates TagWhat from Foursquare (and what makes it more like Facebook), is the fact that it eschews the formers' game mechanics and focuses on the user interaction and community building aspects of the latter. The basic use of TagWhat is that it lets users turn a view of any location into an engrossing, educational experience, as users provide interesting stories and entertaining information about every single thing that can be captured by your camera - think a diner and its history is interesting enough?

The Lab’s first game went live this week, called Ball Invasion (here’s a link on iTunes). It’s a shooter in which the world around you becomes a canvas for playing: hold your iPad 2 in front of you, and it becomes a window on a world that fills with targets that you can chase and shoot. The game’s fun enough, but really the excitement is all about the technology. While you’ve no doubt seen augmented reality before, the difference here is 13th Lab is using a complex computer vision technique known as SLAM — that’s Simultaneous Localization and Mapping. This is a system developed in part by NASA for use in robotics, which allows an object (like, say, a drone) to look around, build up a picture of the world and then understand where it is.

When it comes to mobile Augmented Reality technology, Qualcomm is the top dog. The San Diego company has the biggest AR R&D unit in the world and the message from its recent Uplinq conference in California was clear - it thinks that AR is going to play a significant role in shaping the mobile media horizon.

Qualcomm's senior director of business development Jay Wright

"For Qualcomm, we think the technology is interesting, we follow it closely but it's not on our near to mid-term horizon. This is beyond the five to eight year window," he said.