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Researchers in Finland have made a prototype pair of high-tech glasses that track your gaze and display information about what you’re looking at.

The augmented reality glasses are part of a UI-ART project (Urban contextual information interfaces with multimodal augmented reality), that hook up to a small portable computer and retrieves the information to be displayed through a database.

This concept could open up a world of opportunities, especially for people visiting new countries as they can simply look at a historical landmark and once relevant information regarding that landmark is retrieved, it’s shown on a tiny transparent display that sits close to your eyes.

They can even display information on people that you look at (watch the video), telling who they are, there interests, even give you their Twitter and Facebook page information.

“The glasses recognize people and some objects you see, and try to infer if you would be interested in getting more information about them,” said study co-author Samuel Kaski, director of the Helsinki Institute for Information Technology at Aalto University.

“The data is displayed on the inside of the lenses but in such a way that it seems to be out in the real world.”

However, this type of augmented reality is not new; there are apps for your smartphone that use this technology to a lesser extent, like:

Layar is one of the most amazing augmented reality iPhone apps ever. Layar captures the view from your iPhone and using information about your location through GPS coordinates, displays a graphic overlay of information about places around you

The Bionic Eye iPhone application provides information about any location that you point your iPhone at. It provides information about local points of interest and guides you to them.

Le Bar guide is an iPhone application that can point to the nearest bars for you and provide information about them as you point your iPhone around capturing these locations. Nice application to have in your iPhone in case you are in the mood for a drink and need directions.

Kaski sounds optimistic that his team’s high-tech lenses being available commercially in five to 10 years. He said he and his colleagues will detail their findings in a forthcoming issue of the journal Virtual Reality.