When last we met (yes, yes I’ll get that talk online soon) I tried to explain the importance of geo-data in imaging. One of the examples I used was from Mt. Hood (via Panoramio) and I suggested while the below represents the mundane — a bunch of tourist photos — we can understand that importance of the technique if, say, we had the same cluster of photos during a natural disaster.

The idea was that if you combined geotagged images with the capabilities of what we see on a Flickr where Users can mark upon and comment within images, you could have a pretty amazing crowd sourcing opportunity. To jog your memory, here’s an example of people commenting within images.

This is a screenshot of an image on Flickr that viewers have written comments upon. Each “box” with the thin border around it is where a User has attached a comment to.

So, in our hypothetical you can have the layout of photos as seen in the Mt. Hood exampel with the additional information we see here. This all comes in very handy. Think earthquake, think hundreds of uploaded pictures that are geotagged so we know exactly where we looking at, and then think crowdsourcing information onto them so rescue workers can look at the images and know immediately what might be under the rubble.

But none of that is what this is about. What this is about is an article I came across in ReadWriteWeb that’s pretty amazing. It’s a review of two iPhone applications that allow you to point your 3GS iPhone at something and/or in a direction, and if you’re in camera mode, Wikipedia information about what your pointing out will appear on your screen.

As RWW explains:

Augmented Reality (AR) apps use your phone’s GPS to know where you are and the compass to know which direction you’re looking at. Then these two apps can tell you what you’re looking at that’s written up in Wikipedia.