But… then I discovered the truly nifty aspect of this system.

Its hooked to a data source (presumably fed from the control tower)… the system is tracking all air movements in and out of the airport, all aircraft parked at gates… every plane out there that is ‘active’.

When you aim at a plane – not just at a gate, but also any plane taxing around on the airport – the system tells you what that plane is.

It shows you departure/arrival information, airline etc etc.

This is really, really spacey. It is (in effect) a great, simple, approachable example of Augmented Reality 🙂

It works only in this very limited (and controlled) domain, but I was immediately reminded of my favourite Science Fiction book, ‘Snow Crash’, and the notion of looking around at the world through goggles that add information sources to the world you see, to tell you more about it than you can know with your unaided eyes.

I just think this is super cool. Partly for what it does, and partly for how it does it with no user instructions… This amazing technology demo is just sitting there, waiting for someone to walk up and discover it.