In this week's edition of The Esoteric Beat, Gamasutra's weekly column exploring the esoteric side of video game design, regular columnist Jim Rossignol examines the possibilities of augmented reality, as outlined in this introduction: "Augmented realities, those experiences which tweak the real world with clever technology to generate virtual interactions, haven't exactly taken the entertainment world by storm. Nevertheless they're bubbling along in the background of our thinking about games and game-related tech, and the implementation of AR regularly surprises us with new applications of old ideas. In fact quite a lot of what we're seeing these days is just filling in the details of what Matt Groves predicted in this 1997 article. Modern AR projects are, predictably, fairly esoteric, and although only a few of them have been developed as game projects, they have nevertheless found their best applications in some things that might otherwise have been videogames." You can read the full Gamasutra column for more (no registration required, please feel free to link to this column from external websites).