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nerdology:

Augmented Reality Cinema

This is an ad for an “upcoming” app called Augmented Reality Cinema.  I’m going to call bullshit strait away here because I don’t think what they are doing is augmented reality. It’s can’t be. That part where the dude in the midground is also transplanted into a scene from Snatch is not something that happened. There is no way the iPhone can know what to bring (the guy) into the movie and what to remove (everything else).

Now that I’ve called bullshit I want to take a good hard look at what I think they are actually doing.  They are providing an amazing location based service for cinefiles … well, movie goers (too much Hugh Grant to designate the target audience as cinefiles). Regardless I think this is a fantastic, and original, use of the GPS on your phone.  The phone tells the service where you are and the app plays a clip from a movie.  Really smart.

The business model is great also (in theory, their website is lacking in information). I suspect they will charge a fee for each city the application supports. So for 1.99 you get a city like New York.  And it’s cool.  But if you find yourself vacationing in LA an in app purchase will net you the locations in LA as well.  Connect it with Google Maps and you can tour a city based on movie locations which, honestly, is a pretty cool way to tour a city.

It would be even cooler if they crowed sourced (with some approval process) uploading clips.  So if you are in New York and you know exactly where the Walter Peck got covered by liquid Marshmallow Man in Ghostbusters you can add it.

If this application gets released (hello copyright infringement) it will definitely be fun to play with.  And I do want to use it, just don’t lie to me and tell me you can do real time compositing.

-Creighton

[via LikeCOOL]