Sony SmartAR delivers high-speed markerless augmented reality, blows minds (video)

Some may agree that over the years, augmented reality's been slowly losing its appeal given its sometimes laggy and unreliable performance -- most implementations require a weird marker to be in clear sight, and the graphics rendering speed on your handheld device would rely on your slow and steady hands. As such, we were initially skeptical when Sony's SmartAR announcement came along; but as you can see in the video above, said technology took us by surprise with its super slick responsiveness, and the markerless object recognition makes a compelling hassle-free selling point. What's more, the same clip also shows off SmartAR handling large 3D space with ease -- notice how the virtual objects continue to animate even when the original anchor object is out of sight. Sony hasn't given any dates here, but there's no doubt that once SmartAR is available to game developers and advertisers, it'll rack in some nice pocket money for the electronics giant.