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"      I found a surprise when I checked my mailbox today (for the first time in at least a week): a pamphlet from the US Postal Service advertising various holiday services, among them a free new augmented reality app for iPhone and Android. The acronym-heavy USPS AR app, released earlier this week, is supposed to let you scan any of the USPS&amp;#039;s iconic blue collection boxes in your neighborhoods using your smartphone&amp;#039;s camera. The app should then display holiday-themed &amp;quot;tips, tricks and entertainment&amp;quot; on top of the mailbox in your smartphone&amp;#039;s camera view. It&amp;#039;s a simple demonstration of augmented reality&amp;#039;s potential: layering digital information over real-world objects in ways that add context or provide richer experiences. But to keep itself relevant in the digital age, the USPS needed to go further than this first attempt, which is little more than a greeting card. The idea of turning stationary physical infrastructure from the analog era into a useful source of updated digital information certainly has appeal. New York City is about to take a similar tack with its 8,400 pay phones, planning to replace them with 10,000 new Wi-Fi hotspots. For the USPS in particular, the challenges of adapting to the digital era have been difficult: insurmountable pension costs and declining paper mail business have put the USPS&amp;#039;s finances in deep trouble. The agency reported a $2 billion dollar quarterly net loss in August, far more than the $740 million it reported in the same period last year. And that was despite revenue increases from price hikes on package deliveries. So far, though, this app hasn&amp;#039;t proven to be the solution for giving today&amp;#039;s generation of smartphone-addicted, constantly texting adults a new reason to visit their local collection boxes. I tested the iPhone app on several blue collection boxes in my neighborhood in Brooklyn and none of them worked. As it turns out, the app needs to capture the USPS Eagle logo in your smartphone&amp;#039;s camera view in order to function properly, and that logo was completely faded on all my local collection boxes. I did manage to get it working on a picture in the USPS pamphlet, but it displayed only animated Christmas lights, snow-covered hills, and a link out to the existing USPS mobile website. While that website does provide services like stamp orders and a mailbox location finder, it would be far more useful if the app itself displayed some basic information about the box I was looking at, such as pickup times or other nearby full-service post office locations. The USPS may be onto something here with its AR app, but so far, the delivery is lacking. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/apps/a13174/the-usps-augmented-reality-app-is-here-17492138/>