Nearest Tube's augmented reality on the iPhone 3GS

This (extremely loud, be careful) video has been making the rounds lately — it's a demo of a new app called Nearest Tube that isn't quite in the App Store yet, but uses both your location information along with the iPhone's compass and video camera to show you an augmented reality picture of where and in which directions around you the nearest London Tube station is. Very cool use of the technology, and while I'm not actually in London to use it (and I don't have a 3GS — obviously the compass is required to make this all work), it looks like it works pretty well. Some of you folks in London will have to give it a try when it gets approved and tell us what you think.

Oh, and the whole augmented reality thing — get ready to hear that term a lot. On the TUAW team list, we were just chatting about microprojectors as well (rumored to be coming to iPhones and iPod touches), and as all of these technologies (video, projectors, compasses and location information) all start to get combined and hooked up to some serious computing power, your phone will be able to tell you more and more about what it sees in the world around you, from Tube or road directions like this app, to restaurants and stores, stars in the sky, and even other iPhones and their users. Hold on to your hats, because more and more, developers won't need to simulate the world around you when they can just show you an augmented version of it through your iPhone's screen.