Nintendo aren't the first to milk this new technology for video games. In 2007 The Eye of Judgement used the Playstation Eye Camera to allow players to manipulate playing cards in 3D space. A rubber mat was placed in front of the player and when a card was placed on this, all sorts of information would pop up, which in turn causes the in-game monsters would fight - sort of like 3D Top Trumps mixed with the little monsters fighting in the Star Wars chess game.
This proved a huge success and the third Eye of Judgement set was released internationally on October 16th 2008 with improved 3D graphics, new monster/spell abilities and an in-game encyclopaedia.
A TomTom would seem as archaic as a paper road map once AR uses your windscreen as a HUD. A CG line running on top of the road itself could guide you precisely to your destination with each street name popping up as a tag as you pass it. Handy if you wake up in the middle of nowhere after a stag weekend, eh?
The computer keyboard could eventually be replaced by using voice commands or hand movements to influence a virtual screen seen through AR glasses. Tom Cruise's crime-solving equipment in Minority Report demonstrated this idea way back in 2002, because Steven Spielberg asked scientists what technology we might have in the near future and based the film around them.
Early forms of Virtual Reality may have been dismissed as a flash in the pan, but that's because we were trying to run before we could walk. The computers weren't powerful enough or realistic enough, and the helmets were so heavy you could only wear it for ten minutes at a time. Augmented Reality promises light-weight glasses, powerful graphics and most importantly it's a blending of artifice and reality. Separately they function reasonably well but together they form something far more useful.
More information about the world will be at our fingertips but we already have computers doing all the hard work for us. Will AR diminish our natural investigative instincts; take away some of our natural desire for hands-on investigation? Perhaps a little, yet the reward would be the endless stream of knowledge flying at us from all directions - and a thirst for knowledge is what makes us human.
We have tasted the future..and it ain't Garlic bread: It's Augmented Reality.