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Can Life Be As Browsable As The Web? Augmented Reality Outfit Metaio Thinks So | Fast Company

With the augmented reality browser, Junaio, your smartphone can recognize reality via its camera—and then tell you even more about it.

Metaio just transformed its Junaio Augmented Reality browser into a highly useful tool. Its new Scan function recognizes a range of real things—from pictures to QR codes to product barcodes—so it can supply extra info to its users about what it’s looking at. This suggests a near future wherein everything from product demos to store offers could be delivered using AR.

Junaio’s 3.0 release is a big transformation for the software—it included limited object recognition powers for about a year, but the new system is far more sophisticated. As well as relying on the usual AR sensor suite of GPS (to tell the software where the smartphone is on the planet), compass, and gyros to work out what angle the phone’s camera is looking, it also uses feature tracking to give it a better idea of the objects in its field of view. As long as one of Junaio’s channels or databases or the platforms of its developer partners has information on the object, it’ll pop up on screen.