One of the gadgets announced at CES last week was Celestron’s SkyScout, a hand-held viewfinder that identifies stars being viewed, based on GPS + compass and accelerometer to tell your location and where in the sky you’re looking. Cute concept — assuming they did a good job on the implementation, it’s nice example of hand-held augmented reality that avoids most of the normal difficulties: the environment being tagged (the night sky) is extremely well-modeled and predictable, the user tends to be looking in one place rather than walking around or moving his viewfinder, it’s always outdoors with a good view of the sky so GPS always works, and it’s night so you don’t have to worry about the sun washing out the display (it also uses both text and audio, so presumably you can also avoid having the display wash out your night vision).
(Link via B.K. DeLong.)