Stimulus Spending, Before Your Very Eyes

The government watchdogs at the Sunlight Foundation have released a new iPhone 3GS/Android phone app that uses the phones' "augmented reality" function--which is probably the spookiest technology that exists today, outside the guided-missile acumen of predator drones--to conjure floating representations of stimulus contracts, wherever you are.

Augmented reality
lets users hold up a phone and see, on screen, the world
in front of them as if they're taking a photo--but with floating digital images that augment one's
surroundings with pertinent information.

In this case, the locations of projects contracted under the $787 billion stimulus and their distance from you. Users can filter the visible results by the sizes of contracts or the names of their recipients: