Museum of the Phantom City, designed by Irene Cheng and Brett Snyder, is an iPhone app that offers a unique view of New York. It allows you to discover architectural projects that never materisalised, and because the application knows where you are in the city, it presents you with images of how your location might have looked if these ambitious ideas were realised.

Sounds like a really immersive concept, doesn’t it? Unfortunately, using the application is a frustrating experience, purely because it doesn’t live up to its potential. Augmented reality applications already exist that can place graphics over video images, which would have been incredible for an application like this. Imagine walking through New York and actually seeing Buckminster Fuller’s Dome surrounding you, or seeing unbuilt buildings constructed on your screen in 3D? Hopefully we’ll see a second version of this app that does just that, but for now we’ll have to settle for some old sketches intermittently popping up on your iPhone screen.