Yelp sneaks some augmented reality on your phone

The new Yelp 3.0 app is pretty slick, with a handful of new features.  The best one, however, is undocumented — a very slick augmented reality view.

We talked about augmented reality a bit with the Wikitude app a few days ago, but Yelp is the first US-based one we’ve seen.  To access it on the app, shake the phone a few times and you’ll enable a feature called “the Monicle”.  This will show the world through your camera, and overlay locations of nearby restaurants, bars and other businesses.

It’s really more cool than useful, but it’s fun to play with.  Here’s a quick video that shows how to activate it:

I expect we’ll see many more of these types of apps in the near future, so it should be an exciting year.