The government watchdogs at the Sunlight Foundation have released a new iPhone 3GS/Android phone app that uses the phones' "augmented reality" function--which is probably the spookiest technology that exists today, outside the guided-missile acumen of predator drones--to conjure floating representations of stimulus contracts, wherever you are.
Augmented reality
lets users hold up a phone and see, on screen, the world
in front of them as if they're taking a photo--but with floating digital images that augment one's
surroundings with pertinent information.
In this case, the locations of projects contracted under the $787 billion stimulus and their distance from you. Users can filter the visible results by the sizes of contracts or the names of their recipients:
Hey, Chris -
You forgot to explain what we're seeing on the screen in the example you provided.
Hey Matt,
I added a little bit, plus another of their screen shots. The floating bubbles, Sunlight says on its blog, represent stimulus contracts and the location of the projects.
They don't necessarily correspond to things you can see--rather, it shows you how far away they are (the darker blue ones being closer, the lighter blue being farther away).
Chris