Seems like popular science thinks it's good for selling magazines.

Here are some more practical examples of what the technology might be good for.

LAYAR is an app that uses your cell-phone video camera to let you look at the city THROUGH your phone while it augments that image with location-specific information: available jobs, real estate, night-life.

Here are two examples of game-applications. Here is a virtual pet that is overlaid onto your physical desktop using black-and white tiles:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_0bitKDKd…

Here is a more elaborate "zombie game":
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uGNgyGU-8…

Lastly - think of the fun you could have using these things in combination. The QRCode, a two dimensional bar-code, could be used for both position and index purposes. Your band-poster could be a QR Code sticker that when viewed through an Augmented Reality device would have whatever information you updated it with - your next show, a song, hell - bands could have iguanas scaling light poles singing about the next album release.

Augmented Reality is going to take the issue of blue-tooth headsets and create a city where we are not simply talking to people "not there" - but now we're not even SEEING the same things.

Good times, good times.

@2: There obviously isn't any need to use QRCode or similar markup tools. Neither the magazine cover nor the zombie game use them, after all. SIFT (or similar) image features are far more generalized, less intrusive, and really just about as accurate for matching pure affine transformations like 2D printed surfaces.

IBM did this last year.

@3 - The "Zombie Game" does use a markup device in the form of the board-game map. The magazine cover appears to be using the right-angle in orange, as well as the conspicuous black bars one the left and right margins of the cover. If you look at the video - this is more obvious:
http://ge.ecomagination.com/smartgrid/po…

While LAYAR is using geo-positioning (GPS with compass bearing) anything requiring exacting position would need some sort of artificial reference point to determine the exact position and orientation.

I was positing that something like QRCode would be used not because they're necessarily the most advanced technology, but that they are easily reproduced, could weather well, and have the cache of being uninterpretable to an unaided human. It could be social crack for teenagers.

*) Your favorite band could hand out cards at their show, and when you look at them later you could see messages and up-to-date information. Based on the networked device that you were looking at the card through (who's phone it was for example) - you could see different, "secret" information. Authority figures would see nothing.

*) A racier idea - how about something like a QRCode woven into your clothes? Or stuck to your backback? Your friends would be able to see your familiar. Or heck, maybe see an image of you naked. All that would require is a unique id markup, and a portable implementation of something like Microsoft's NATAL (http://www.pcworld.com/article/166534/co…)

Sometimes being cool is enough.

And Popular Science just had an article about this cool flying car that we'll all be driving in a couple of years!

Oh Snap!