Blair MacIntyre imagines a world where tiny clouds of information -- Facebook statuses, business cards, Twitter posts -- float above all of our heads.

In some ways, it's not that far from reality.

Advancements in mobile phone technology have cleared the way for a coming wave of "augmented reality" applications that merge the physical world with information compiled about people and places on the Internet.

"When the technology gets there, this stuff could be amazingly useful and mildly terrifying in some ways," said MacIntyre, an associate professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology who has taught classes in augmented reality for a decade.

The idea of pairing digital information with our real, 3-D environments is not especially new -- think robot-human vision in the "Terminator" movies. MacIntyre even plodded about college campuses in the 1990s wearing a 40-pound backpack and nerdy goggles, trying to make something similar happen.

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