We've seen some cool augmented reality apps shown off that will point you towards the closest subway or find your mom, but this TAT Augmented ID app takes it to the next level. It's mindblowing, but it leaves me conflicted.


Using facial recognition, it allows you to point your phone at someone and immediately link them up to whatever social networking sites they have linked up at that time.


Really, the video does a better job of showing how it works than I can describe it, so why don't you go watch it. Done? Good.

Clearly, this isn't something we're going to see in the App Store anytime soon. It's a next-gen idea, but one that I think we'll be seeing sooner rather than later. The tech is all just about there, it's just going to be contingent on a platform or program that everyone voluntarily signs up for and uses. But at some point in our lives, we'll be using phones in a fashion similar to this.

Of course, whether or not it'll be a good thing that strangers will be able to point their phones in our faces and get a rundown of our online lives is debatable. There's probably a lot to be said for learning about someone via conversation, but it's not like people don't go home from bars and Google and Facebook search the people they met that night. This just takes it to the logical extreme.

Good? Bad? Probably somewhere in between. But it's definitely interesting. [YouTube via The Daily What]