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Navigon just recently rolled out a stylish  iPhone Car Kit for use with its iOS navigation app, and it's now also announced a fairly significant update to the app itself. In addition to all the usual basic navigation features, MobileNavigator 1.8 now also boasts an augmented reality component dubbed the "Reality Scanner" that overlays points of interest on top of a live camera view, as well as a new "Safety Cameras" feature that warns you of speed and red light cameras (available as an in-app purchase for $4.99). What's more, Navigon has also dropped its prices across the board for the occasion -- the full app with maps for all of North America will now set you back just $45 until April 18th, while versions for just the US or Canada run $35 apiece. Full press release is after the break. NAVIGON Updates iPhone Navigation App with Augmented Reality and Safety Camera Features MobileNavigator Version 1.8 Also Delivers Latest NAVTEQ Maps and a Traffic Check...

The US military seems to adore the idea of wearable displays, hence its continued efforts to make them a reality. We know it seems like just yesterday that DARPA tapped Lockheed Martin to build low-power, lightweight augmented-reality eyewear, and it was actually  four  full years ago when the wild and wonderous dream was to craft HMDs as small and light as "high-fashion sunglasses." Well, that dream lives on, this time with holograms: the lenscrafters at Vuzix just received a cool million to develop goggles that holographically overlay battlefield data on the wearer's vision. It all sounds very Dead Space (or, you know, like a Top Secret version of Recon-Zeal's Transcend goggles), promising realtime analysis of anything within sight. The company believes the finished product will be no more than 3mm thick and completely transparent when turned off. If all goes well, expect this to trickle down to consumers in short order; soon you'll have full "situational ...

No matter how hard Skype and others try to convince us otherwise, we still do most of our web communications via text or, if entirely unavoidable, by voice. Maybe we're luddites or maybe video calling has yet to prove its value. Hoping to reverse such archaic views, researchers at the MIT Media Lab have harnessed a Kinect's powers of depth and human perception to provide some newfangled videoconferencing functionality. First up, you can blur out everything on screen but the speaker to keep focus where it needs to be. Then, if you want to get fancier, you can freeze a frame of yourself in the still-moving video feed for when you need to do something off-camera, and to finish things off, you can even drop some 3D-aware augmented reality on your viewers. It's all a little unrefined at the moment, but the ideas are there and well worth seeing. Jump past the break to do just that. Kinected Conference (MIT Media Lab)