Junaio's augmented reality app for iPhone and Android can add cartoons to your otherwise-boring existence
As an augmented reality navigator that you want to use for finding pizza joints and friends on Foursquare and Twitter, you've got more polished options than Junaio's new 2.0 release -- Layar and Yelp, just to name a couple -- but Junaio has at least one interesting differentiator with a feature it calls "Glue." Basically, independent content providers can develop their own Junaio "channels," which function in the same way as a Layar layer -- it's a particular set of points of interest that'll be displayed in the current view. With Glue, though, Junaio isn't just using your positional information as a point of reference, it can also scan the image for specific objects that developers have programmed their channel to look for, and when such an object is found, crazy things can happen.
In Junaio's demo, pointing the camera at a superhero-type cartoon dude causes a 3D representation of him to be rendered on the phone's screen; when you tap on him, he'll point his gun. It's an interesting concept that could eventually have some commercial implications, but in the short term, the company just needs to improve the app -- it crashed several times for us, and its support for changing orientation is a little wonky. If you want to check it out, it's a free download for both the iPhone and Android; while you wait for the install, check out our quick video demo after the break.
