From Wikipedia we learn that "Augmented reality (AR) is a field of computer research which deals with the combination of real-world and computer-generated data (virtual reality), where computer graphics objects are blended into real footage in real time". This is only a definition. A video, like this http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bhlq_GhYGsM can immediately communicate what AR is. When i first saw Eye Of The Judgment, a game for PS3 from Sony, i tought that it was a really interesting thing to do. So i searched the web, read the needed books and learned a lot of things about AR. In that video, you can see the presentation of the game. The game run on a PS3 with the Eye Toy attached to it. The live video is augmented in the following way: when you put in front of the camera one of the card designed specifically for the game, you can see on the TV a 3D character on it. You can move the card around and the model will follow it. You can even take the card on your hand and rotate it a bit and you will see the model correctly rendered on it. This is the most basic form of AR based on fiducial markers. A fiducial marker is a special 2D (sometimes can be 3D) object designed to simplify the process of augmentation. See the page dedicated to fiducial marker detection. At the bottom of the page you can click some links to learn more about AR and Frontier Vision.

Notable features of the Frontier Vision library are: