Urban Spoon app adds Augmented Reality to help you scope out a place to eat

We first told you last year all about the UrbanSpoon iPhone app, which allows you to find a restaurant by shaking your phone. Now, the developers have upgraded the app to help you find a way to chow down by adding a new Scope feature.

This feature is an augmented reality app, and is exclusive to the iPhone 3GS. All you have to do is aim your iPhone at the street to see what is out there to eat. (Well, in a restaurant anyway…it doesn’t tell you what is in the neighbor’s fridge.) What is does is allow users to view their surroundings as if they were looking through a periscope. Big round colored bubbles that contain information on how people liked it will pop up on different local restaurants. When you aim the cross-hair on a restaurant in which you are interested, you get even more information. Info offered up includes distance, cuisine, and pricing. This all comes up in a square box.

These augmented reality apps and features have been making their way into the smartphone world as of late. Others which use it are Yelp and Wikitude. Wikitude uses it to display information about points of interest and nearby landmarks. Also quite nifty.

I’m sure we are going to see more and more apps implementing this technology as time goes on. Maybe one for the best sale prices on tech? Yeah, that would be cool.

Read [applecontrol]