Mobile Journalism and Augmented Reality: the context in your hand

The emergence of new mobile devices, such as smartphones and tablets, are changing how we interact with news. Accessing information from these devices has all the advantages offered by newspapers on the web, also allowing more personalized consumption. Apart from the obvious advantages of using this type of individual handsets,now they sum up the possibility of enjoying technical features such as GPS receiver, accelerometer or video cameras embedded in those devices. These technologies could enrich the news contents and a good example of this potential is the Augmented Reality (AR): the possibility of placing layers of virtual information on real images captured at the moment is an opportunity to enrich the news with a contextualization that can be continuously updated. This paper seeks to explain the role of AR on mobile journalism.