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New apps are coming for Nokia users! (iPhone: you’d better wake up)

“Augmented reality”, a way of bringing digital content to life in the “real world” is a bit of a buzz tech at the moment, and Nokia is currently working on various versions of the tech.

Shown off at the Nokia World event in Germany, Nokia’s augmented reality, dubbed “mixed reality” by the phone maker, is currently in development by the Nokia Research department.

Demonstrations of the technology that Pocket-lint got hands-on with include the concept of making digital content embeddable in an everyday environment.

This application of the tech would “tag” locations to alert Nokia phone users to something of interest in their vicinity.

In the example shown an urban landscape offered hidden meaning via the “mixed reality” solution. A consumer arriving at a certain point (the example given was via bike) would receive an alert from their phone to let them know something might be of interest to them in the near location.

By panning their handset around the locale, the user will get further alerts – via haptic feedback, or an audible alert – when they are pointing their phone in the correct direction.

Feedback can be tailored to the particular point of interest. Again, in the example, a jazz cafe played a blast of music when the phone alighted on it.

By tilting the locating device (in the future a Nokia handset but in the Research demo, a wired, white remote) sharply upward more information is conveyed – in this case a brief recording revealing the gig for that evening.

In addition this solution, that would likely be aimed at commercial customers to advertise to Nokia users who might register preferences to get tailored alerts, Nokia is also working on a solution aimed at consumers to create themselves.

Similar to the likes of the Wimbledon augmented reality app we recently saw from IBM, this option would combine mixed reality with location-based tech.

The example a Nokia Research exec gave Pocket-lint was that one Nokia user could geotag one location and then create a virtual path to another location, all via the GPS capabilities of their handset.

A second user, when arriving at the first geotagged location would then get an alert to let them know they had arrived at the location, whip out their phone, hold it up to the landscape and see a virtual path mapped out across the real-time image displayed via their phone’s camera with a pop-up informing them of the end location.

As with other Nokia Research projects we’ve brought you news of, all this tech is ready and waiting to go, as soon as price comes down and demand goes up, you can expect to see these kind of solutions offered as features in a future Nokia device.