For millennia our data has existed much in the same manner, two dimensionally. Certainly, over time we have found better ways to display, sort, and interact with information, but it nonetheless has always existed external to our world. For example, an individual picks up a newspaper and reads about the event that occurred near his/her home, or someone searches a map on a smartphone to find nearby restaurants, or a family or business team chronicles information on social media or in a database. If the aforementioned instances of information represent the past and present, then augmented reality undeniably depicts the not too distant future.

In short, augmented reality enables the user to alter the view of the world around him with computer-aided technology. Whereas virtual reality replaces one’s world with a simulated version, augmented reality seeks only to enhance the relevant features of a locale; it is here that Palantir Mobile is finding success. Started as a Hack Week project by four engineers, Palantir Mobile allows users to actively collaborate and update the base application of Palantir from the field using only a smart phone. In practice, a law enforcement officer or a warfighter can employ Palantir Mobile to collaborate in real time with an analyst at offices/bases throughout the world.

From disaster response to intelligence and military operations, Palantir Mobile allows the user to chart the locations of his team members in real-time, access active UAV feeds within a map application, and via the camera on a smartphone, display relevant information about an area with persistent augmented reality overlays; Because of Palantir Mobile’s strides in the field of augmented reality, a solider can use the camera on his smartphone to display the actual view of the world currently around him with tooltips of relevant events, such as an IED attack, directly overlayed on the screen.

While numerous companies are making strides towards breaking open the world of augmented reality technology, most notably Google with its recent Google Glass project, many efforts exist only in a conceptual phase. Palantir Mobile has managed to achieve deployment in Afghanistan and, in doing so, has successfully overcome numerous hurdles to augmented reality implementation, particularly, bandwidth issues, real-time syncing, and hardware/software conflicts. Augmented reality inevitably appears to be the next “Big Thing” and innovative companies such as Google, and products, such as Palantir Mobile, will be integral in blazing the proverbial trail towards this new technological horizon.