Despite decades of hype, virtual reality has never really managed to live up to, well, reality. But new applications that blend real and virtual worlds via the medium of a smartphone may have the missing ingredient needed to make the technology take off.

Instead of completely immersing a person in a virtual environment, augmented or mixed reality involves adding digital features to the world they see around them.

Changing the world in this way requires drawing on nearly every faculty the latest smartphones possess – camera, GPS, tilt sensors, digital compass and wireless broadband – to determine exactly what is being looked at, and to find and display relevant extra data.

So what are the advantages of augmenting your reality? Simply, the technology allows you to point a phone at an object and see an enhanced version of reality on the screen – whether a mountain labelled with its height, a person tagged with their name, or celestial objects properly labelled in the night sky.