For example, homebuyers in the market for a new build house might wander around a building site where only the foundations have been laid, but through the camera on their phone they see what the buildings will eventually look like, how close together they will be, how the public spaces will be landscaped etc. A new immersive take on the 3D fly-throughs often rendered by architects. Imagine wandering around the site of the Olympic Village in London and seeing how it will look two years from now (or wandering around at the opening ceremony in two years time, and seeing how it looked before the bulldozers moved in).

This could have great applications in education too: Last year I visited the Port Arthur former penal colony in Tasmania. Lots of old crumbling buildings that were used as cells, work houses, staff accommodation etc. Today visitors wander round with a paper leaflet or follow a tour guide to learn about the site but the experience would be much more immersive if the information was delivered to my phone screen. Imagine students seeing how the buildings would have looked 180 years ago or looking at archealogical sites and pointing their phone at the ground to see what lies beneath.

Another application of AR is for giving directions – your AR display becomes your own personal signpost. Hold it in front of you and it shows you what is North, South, East or West of your current location, or which direction you should travel to reach your destination. I can see this being used in theme parks, festivals and large campuses as well as for general directions from A to B.

Current apps overlay text or thumbnail images, but I see no reason why they couldn’t also overlay video – avatars of a tour guide, or locals from 100 years ago in period dress acting out their daily lives – the display screen becomes a portal that allows you to see the scene in front of you as it would have been at a different point in time.

I’m a Formula1 fan and I can imaging walking around a Grand Prix circuit and using AR to point out the names of different corners of the race track, significant events that happened in previous races at the spot where I’m standing and even show replays on the screen of my phone, overlaid on the image of the track in front of me.

Current augmented reality apps are still in their infancy and one of the problems I’m already seeing is that there are more and more apps becoming available and there’s no compatibility between them. If I want to see London Underground stations I have to install Layar, if I want to see flickr photos I have to install Wikitude and so on. In order to stop the fragmentation of augmented reality apps we need standardisation of the data format used for delivery geotagged data to the AR app. I suspect that the app developers are reluctant to standardise becuause they see “their” data as their USP (although wikitude now let users create their own data via the wikitude.me site. If the app developers can crack this, then there should be an exciting future ahead for augmented reality.

High Tea consisted of tea (obviously), cakes and crustless sandwiches as well as a hot buffet. We decided to have a Singapore Sling with ours, not exactly traditional, but it was the last  day of our trip afterall.

After High Tea, we did a short boat trip on the river before returning to the hotel to prepare to be transferred to the airport.

So that’s it. It’s all over. Back to reality and English weather tomorrow. Boo Hoo.

The following morning, we had been booked on a sightseeing tour. This took us to various places including the Marina…

Chinatown…

the Botanical Gardens…

and Little India.

We decided to stay in Little India for a very [Tom: very, very] nice Indian lunch at The Banana Leaf [Tom: where you eat your food from a banana leaf rather than a plate] followed by a Mango Lassi before heading off to the Singapore Flyer.

The flyer is like the London Eye but 30 metres bigger making it the biggest big wheel in the world. This experience would have been improved if we hadn’t had to share the capsule with 5 or 6 irritating children. We could barely hear the commentary.

Then it was back to the hotel for a quick rest before heading out to the Night Safari, which is basically a zoo with animals that come out at night. First we went round in a tram seeing rhino, giraffes and lions amongst other things and then we walked around the walking trails. It is quite frightening how close you can get to these animals without anything obvious to stop them from eating you! [Tom: In places they have things like moats to stop the animals from getting too close but in other places there is nothing and you're not in a powerful 4x4 with a ranger armed with a shotgun in case anything goes wrong! In places there were animals right next to the tram (which has no sides) and we were warned not to use flash photography. That's my excuse for the rubbish photos].

Today we’re heading down to the colonial district for a look round, high tea at Raffles and a ride in a boat before returning to the hotel to transfer to the airport. They say that “if you haven’t been to Raffles, you haven’t been to Singapore”. We’ve a long flight ahead of us before we get to Heathrow.

A couple of things I find either odd or misguided about the whole thing (and let me preface this by admitting that my understanding of the political system in our country is not nearly as good as it ought to be): The political output from the BBC should not favour one particular party and exclude another nor should the BBC censor the voice of political parties. Like it or not, Griffin and his party have received a substantial number of votes and therefore must have some degree of support and should be given a voice. I would hope that in the case of Question Time, Griffin is challenged by a competent set of panelists that show him and his party as ignorant racists (and that certainly seems to have been the case from the commentary I have seen).

Secondly, I think that the efforts of all those who protested against the BBC’s decision would be better spent targeting the people who voted for the BNP at various recent electiosn. Just like we were always told as children: if you ignore him, he’ll go away. If the BNP had no support, then nobody would be interested in hearing their views and the BBC would never consider broadcasting them.

From what I’ve read today, I can’t believe that Nick Griffin’s appearance on Question time has done him or his party any good at all. Which is a good thing.

Anyway, now that I’ve got that off my chest I can get back to posting photos from my holiday. Which is probably why you came here in the first place.

We then paddled across rougher ocean to Dent Island which is owned by the same person as Hamilton Island and has a newly opened golf course that has taken 8 years to build. We landed the kayaks further around Dent Island on Yahoo Beach and had a chance to try some more snorkelling. I found it much easier today in the calmer water and could have spent hours floating in the water except that the water was a little murky so there was nothing to see (something to do with the tides apparently).

We then  got back in our kayaks and paddled back across the sea to Hamilton Island where we paddled along the coast through the mangroves and back to the marina with aching arms having travelled about 5 kilometres in total.

After lunch we went back to the marina to board a small boat that would take us parasailing (strapped into a harness attached to a parachute that is tethered to the back of a boat). There were three couples on the boat and we were the last so we had chance to watch the others before we had our go. It’s not actually as scary as you might think, and it’s actually quite a smooth flight. The view is rather good too.

Off back to One Tree Hill now for more sunset drinks and a glass of bubbly to mark our last day in Oz before heading to the marina for fish and chips.

It’s an early flight tomorrow as we head to Singapore, arriving there at about 7pm local time.

After about 20 minutes flying over the islands, including the famous Whitehaven beach, we started the 15 minute flight out to “Reef World”.

The helicopter lands on a small pontoon and a boat comes to collect you and take you over to Reef World which is a big floating station with cafe, showers, changing rooms, viewing decks and all the equipment for diving and snorkelling.

We went snorkelling first and then had a ride in a “semi-submersible”. You don’t wear a wetsuit for snorkelling but they do advise you to put on an anti-stinger suit (which is a fancy sounding name for a lycra catsuit) to protect you from jellyfish and other stinging creatures and to make you look like a power ranger (or like you’re about to compete on Hole in the Wall). The ones in my size were a lovely pale yellow! Snorkelling takes a bit of getting used to as I found that when I put my head under the water my natural reaction was to hold my breath rather than to breathe through the snorkel and I was a bit apprehensive about getting water in my mask at first because I was wearing my contact lenses. It was quite a windy day today which didn’t help because you’re really out in the middle of the ocean so the water was quite rough. We only had about 45 minutes in the water because we wanted to fit everything else in and I was just starting to get the hang of it toward the end. There’s a huge number of brightly coloured fish just below the surface though and they swim right up to you.  (Tracey – We did have our picture taken in the water with some fish by a man from Yorkshire, but in true Tom style, he had his eyes shut so we didn’t bother buying it.) The coral reef is quite impressive too but it was quantity and variety of the fish that I was most impressed by. I’d love to go snorkelling again and learn to get the hang of it better – we probably should have done it in calmer water for our first time. I had a waterproof camera bag for our compact camera so wanted to take loads of pictures under the water. It’s a bit fiddly to operate the buttons through the waterproof case though when you’re trying to stay afloat and you’ve got pretty big waves coming towards you. That combined with the fact that I’d used most of the camera battery in the helicopter meant that I only got about 6 shots in the water.

After lunch was the semi-sub ride. It’s like a boat where you sit in the bottom of the hull and the sides and floor are made of glass so as it sails around you can see the fish and reef. On a normal day it would be quite impressive but it wasn’t as good as the snorkelling so I’d recommend skipping the sub and spending longer in the water.

Tomorrow is another action packed day on and above the water…

It’s a beautiful island but I can’t help feeling that someone found a paradise island and thought it would be a good idea to turn it into a paradise “resort”. It’s sort of like a big campus or a massive Butlins camp. Although there are people who live here, everything is geared up for tourists. There are no cars here just a mix of petrol and battery driven golf buggies which make an amusing sight on the roads. We started our day by organising some trips and activities for the next couple of days (more on that later), and then went for a walk to explore the island.

We went to the main beach “Catseye Beach” and sat in the sun for a while. At certain times of the year they don’t recommend that you go in the sea because of the risk from potentially deadly jellyfish so there’s also quite a cool pool that looks out over the sea and has a bar in the centre so you can swim over to order your cocktails.

Later we walked to the marina and checked out some of the massive boats and snapped some pics of the exotic birds while we had lunch. There’s also an estate agent so we tried to pick which house we’d buy if we ever have between $1 and $2million to spend on a holiday home.

Later in the afternoon we caught the free shuttle bus up to the One Tree Hill lookout to watch the sunset over the other islands with a cocktail before going back to the marina for dinner.

Tomorrow we have an exciting day that starts with a helicopter ride!

map

We booked a 4WD trip to Cape Tribulation for our second day. This involved being picked up in a cool 4WD minibus thing (at 7am!) and transported to various parts of the tropical rainforest.

We had an entertaining driver/guide who knew all about the history of the rainforests and the different species of native plants and animals.

We also had a BBQ lunch and a cup of local tea grown in the daintree tea plantion.

In the afternoon we had a crocodile spotting trip on the river where we saw three of them lurking in the shallow water at the edge of the river. Fortunately they didn’t eat anyone and we returned safely in the evening (after a stop at an ice cream farm) with plenty of photos.