Mark Schatzker of Condé Nast Traveler tested the latest—and supposedly, greatest—of Augmented Reality apps in Rome, Italy, and was anything but impressed.
“Can a $5 or $10 app really make visiting cities like Paris, Tokyo, or Moscow a breeze? To find out, I flew to Rome carrying an iPhone 4 and a Samsung Captivate, which runs Google’s Android operating system. After three days of rigorous testing—during which I walked more than 25 miles, weaved past several thousand tourists, consumed two excellent bowls of pasta and molti cones of gelato, and downloaded over 100 megabytes of data—I had the answer. So, does AR deliver all that it promises? Not so much.”