Picture the scene: you have lost your friends at T in the Park. You hold up your iPhone to scan the horizon. On the screen a video of the muddy field of revellers in front of you appears but annotated with arrows not only pointing to where your friends are, but with their latest twitter feeds bobbing above their heads.

Welcome to the world of Augmented Reality (AR), where the digital and the physical worlds collide. It may sound like something lifted from Star Trek but it is an area predicted to be the next big thing in mobile technology. The AR market, which is expected to be worth more than half a billion pounds in four years, is one where Scottish universities are leading the field.