As a followup to a post on interactive electronic board gaming, seems there are a lot of people making strides in Augmented Reality: a fusion of video cameras, optical sites, pattern matching, and digital graphics. (Not to be confused with “Alternate Reality”, which is just a fusion of the real-world and your imagination.)

Augmented reality games let you look through a special set of glasses, or your camera phone, at game pieces on your tabletop. They then render inside the glass frames, or on the phone screen, a view of the game pieces augmented with animated 3-D digital images. So, you can be looking at a card of a baseball player and see a 3-D image of the player standup and swing at a ball.

Wearables is working on a 3-D ARG of Quake, where you run around outside with glasses on and see Quake graphics superimposed onto your friends.

Cellgames is working on ARGs that you can view with your cellphone, including a desktop tower defense game.

Gizmondo’s augmented reality catapult game:

PIT Strategy, an augmented reality racing game:

And, of course, Eye of Judgment did it first, and worst.