With widespread development of commercial mobile augmented reality applications, Mobilizy (http://www.mobilizy.com) have decided it is time for a standard markup language. Mobilizy are an Austrian smartphone development company, and they will be presenting their new mark up language, Argumented Reality Markup Language (ARML) to the Augmented Reality Consortium.

ARML is reportedly based on KML, and will allow the annotations (ie "augmentations") to be written up using an open cross-platform standard. The early creation of such a standard, should help to avoid the "vendor wars" we have seen so often with state-of-the-art formats, including HTML and JavaScript. KML has proved to be a useful markup language for geographic annotation, so it appears to be a natural choice for mobile applications which will be geo-referenced (eg. giving road and tourist directions).

Mobilizy's main competitor is Layar (http://www.layar.com). In the past, Layar have spoken publicly in favor of interoperability, so they are expected to support the acceptance of an ARML-based standard.

Further information can be found at the Open ARML website, and ReadWriteWeb.

In the past week or so, there have been a number of posts and articles in the geo-blogosphere and "tweets" in the geo-twittersphere about Augmented Reality. These have been about a new set of mobile consumer applications for devices such as the iPhone.

A note of caution against all this hype, in sounded in the article "Extra layer of reality gets off to a shaky start" in the current edition of New Scientist (19th Sept 2009, pp.20-21). Problems listed include the lack of sufficiently accurate GPS devices. New Scientist quote an error of up to 70m with an iPhone in Downtown San Francisco, and the compass having typical magnetic-compass problems (ie. 180 degree deviations near metal sculptures).  The size of the GPS device is a problem - I have seen reports that the latest generation of GPS devices that are the size of a thumb drive being 'good' in ideal conditions but satellite lock and distance errors are notably inferior in poor environments such as urban canyons. Even the Trimble Field Computer we use for the Costa Rica field work can only manage 6m accuracy without differential correction, and this is a professional device with a special built-in antenna and is larger than an 80s-era cell phone!

In partnership with Mattys Consulting , our sister site Mapping-Tools.com is now able to offer a range of MapPoint printing services. These include laminated maps, Adobe PDF documents, and TIFF bitmap images. However, what is probably of greatest interest to GeoWeb Guru readers, is the "MapCruncher map tile" option. This can be used to draw MapPoint maps as tile layers on a Bing Maps map.

Most if not all online mapping services have problems when drawing shaded area (choropleth) maps. These are easy with MapPoint's Data Import Wizard and Shaded Area map option. Mattys Consulting can "print" a choropleth map and create MapCruncher tiles for display in Bing Maps, like this: