The deadline for phase one of Google’s Android Developer Challenge closed yesterday, and so the entrants are beginning to show off their wares. One of the more eye-catching is Enkin, an augmented reality app for Android which overlays GPS, motion information and other data over a live camera view of a user’s surroundings. As an idea it’s similar to designer Mac Funamizu’s encyclopedia frame concept, using real-time queries of online information to offer users pertinent information about their environment.

Inputting data into a handheld device - and extracting data in a meaningful, easily interpreted way - is a hurdle that, although seemingly low-level, presents a real problem for developers looking to produce data-rich applications.  In Japan, the QR barcode system has been implemented with some degree of success, using matrix codes that can store address or URLs revealed by ’scanning’ them with a cellphone’s camera; Android developer Tom Gibara has created what could possibly be the next level of matrix coding - a system he calls Moseycode - which not only uses matrices to input data but can then overlay the visual output in real-time on the cellphone’s screen.

As the video (after the cut) shows, the Android software can recognise a 2D barcode glyph and then, according to its physical orientation, display varying information overlaid onto the glyph itself or, as in the second video, near to the glyph.  In this early demo, running on the Android SDK platform rather than as a mockup, the Moseycode tracks the four categories (author, location, status and comments) and can be zoomed in/out by moving the matrix code closer to or further from the cellphone’s camera.