Graffiti's Augmented Reality App For Restaurant Recommendations

One thing is for sure: Augmented Reality (AR) is changing the urban realm and how the city is being perceived. Sometimes we write about neat ideas in the world of AR, and the new Graffiti restaurant recommendation app is absolutely one of those refreshing initiatives.

Graffiti is an online application which allows you to write and read tags, which are short, mobile comments locals and tourists have written on places nearby. People are encouraged to virtually take over a city by tagging, exploring, building a group, and accomplishing time-sensitive challenges. Exploring the Graffiti website, you can see the latest tags added, and a heat map which shows exactly where you have to be for the fun. This kind of information on cool places is not only very interesting for both locals and tourists, it can also be of great value to urban designers as it enables them to see which areas are being considered ‘cool’ by which specific groups of people. It provides clear and instant insights in the current urban atmosphere you couldn’t get before.

As I said, the people behind Graffiti have announced to come up with a fresh application for restaurant recommendations, which combines the useful geotags with the hot world of Augmented Reality (AR). Using the camera of your mobile device and walking down the street, tags pop up on restaurants, showing ratings of people who have been there before. The video above shows how this fresh piece of software can be used. You can imagine such an app would be very useful in the future, when more and more cities are added to the system. You can also imagine what will happen to bad cooks…