New Tools Update: More Augmented Reality Apps Hit the App Store

Ever wish you could have Wikipedia all around you? It's not just me that wishes for things like this, is it? Well, if you have an iPhone 3GS, you now have Wikipedia everywhere, thanks to two new apps, Cyclopedia and WikiTude. WikiTude has been on Android for a few months now, but just arrived for the iPhone. Cyclopedia looks to be basically the same thing, but with (in my opinion) a more attractive interface. Either way, the relatively low number of geotagged Wikipedia entries  will prevent this app from totally changing your life, at least for the moment. But, it's still pretty darn cool.

Perhaps the bigger news is that Layar, the most widely-used augmented reality platform, has just submitted its app to the iPhone app store. Rather than being an app designed to layer a specific data set (such as Wikipedia entries) over physical space, Layar is a platform which supports a whole host of different data sets. Again, these still need some work to be truly game-changing, but things are certainly starting to get interesting, and as more AR apps break into the iPhone scene, the technology will quickly become more mainstream.