The augmented reality arena just became a bit hotter with Urbanspoon’s implementation of augmented reality into the existing feature set. You can now browse or search for a good restaurant or, with a simple shake your iPhone will reveal a random local restaurant. Building upon the results the new “Scope” feature uses Google Maps to show your position in blue and the local restaurants in red pins.

Point your iPhone at the horizon and the real fun starts, the app detects the change via the accelerometer and flips the phone to camera mode, in doing so revealing an augmented reality overlay for each of the restaurants within the viewport. Bright circles map to the restaurants, closer the restaurant, larger the circle. Urbanspoon is a social rating system that allows app users to rate each restaurant, the average rating then appears in the circles – most liked restaurants appear bright orange and restaurants with a low rating fade into shades of grey.

Sadly, the scope feature will only work with the latest iPhone 3GS.

Urbanspoon iPhone Demo

Will it work on the small screen? Well Adobe is giving it a go with the new Adobe Photoshop app for the iPhone. You can edit photos from your phone or stored in your Photoshop.com  account using intuitive finger gestures. Editing is reversible and non-destructive, with the output saving to your iPhone Photos collection and optionally to your online account.

After opening the Photoshop app you’ll be prompted to select a photo from your library or snap a new one. The interface is simple, using a toolbar-style drop-down menu you choose from a collection of editing tools and effects including crop, rotate, and flip, exposure, saturation and tint adjustments, and easy to apply filters including black and white, sketch, soft focus, pop, border, vignette blur, warm vintage, rainbow, soft black and white and white glow – Photoshop lite?

At the bottom of the edit screen is another toolbar with options to cancel, undo or redo an edit, and save the image. Save and Exit simply saves the new pic to your iPhone Photos collection. Use the save and upload option to send a copy to your Photoshop.com account, if you don’t have one don’t worry, the first time you save and upload you’ll be prompted to create one. The great news is that the accounts are free and offer 2 GB of storage, although if you require more you have the option to move onto an annual storage plan or sync to cloud storage?

I guess that the big question is will it actually be used and not end up as a gimmick?

Try it yourself [iTunes link].

http://www.jqtouch.com/