Augmented reality (AR) is an exciting field of research nowadays, prompting publishers to look for publishing opportunities like this book. The subject is covered in nine chapters, the first five dealing with the basics of creating AR applications on the Android platform, and the remaining four describing more complex projects.

The first chapter presents applications of AR in many areas, including military and law enforcement, vehicles, the medical field, courtrooms, tourism, architecture, assembly lines, cinema/performance, entertainment, education, art, translation, weather forecasting, television, and astronomy, among others. Two AR applications for casual users are also discussed: SpecTrek and Wikitude. Two screenshots of SpecTrek are included as Figures 1-1 and 1-2, although no source was specified. Future fields of application are also briefly mentioned, including virtual experiences, impossible simulations, holograms, video conferencing, movies, and gesture control, also without references.

In chapter 2, the author discusses the use of the camera, the accelerometer and orientation sensor, and the global positioning system (GPS). However, the reader should note that the orientation sensor was deprecated in Android 2.2 (API Level 8).

Adding overlays and the usage of markers (based on the AndAR toolkit) are presented in chapter 3. Chapter 4 deals with artificial horizons and details how to create simple AR applications using them. Chapter 5 ends the first part of the book with an explanation of some common and uncommon errors and problems encountered by AR applications developers; this is a good feature of the book.

The AR projects are developed in the next chapters, including the display of current location on a map using the Google Maps application programming interface (API) (chapter 6), a basic navigational system using the GPS and Maps app (chapter 7), a 3D model viewer (chapter 8), and an AR browser (the last chapter). The book also includes an index containing methods, Extensible Markup Language (XML) files, section names, and so on.

In my opinion, the author does not fulfill the aim of a book having such a title. The material is mainly a collection of code for some Android applications making use of special devices such as a camera, sensors, and GPS. The text describing the projects is poor and often not sufficiently relevant. Finally, no citations or references are presented.

Readers should pay attention to the text before buying the book. They should have moderate to advanced knowledge of the Java programming language, basic object-oriented concepts, OpenGL, the Android platform, fundamental algorithms, and Eclipse integrated development environment (IDE) basics. Due to the above considerations, I cannot enthusiastically recommend this book.