A lot of tech-world prognosticators have tagged virtual reality as ‘the next big thing.’ But just as many have pointed out that VR (the ability to interact with a virtual world) will pale in comparison to the sister technology of AR – augmented reality, or the ability to overlay virtual information over the real world.

With a pair of AR-enhanced glasses (or, eventually, contacts) on, you might be able to repair an engine with specs and labels for it digitally overlaid on the metal, or walk through a party with people’s LinkedIn profiles and recent social media updates floating above their heads, like a scene straight out of Super Sad True Love Story.

While that level of interaction is (perhaps fortunately) still a ways off, we’re now seeing some impressive early examples of AR on mobile phones. Consider the Google Translate app, which can translate real-world signs and documents on the fly through your phone’s camera:

Or the venerable SkyView app, which overlays constellations and star and planet names on the night sky:

Both are fun and (at least intermittently) useful, though neither hits as close to home as the Vivino app. The app has long allowed you to scan a wine bottle, to see ratings for it, solving the complete information vacuum represented by most wine stores. But the latest update expands that to an even more socially fraught situation: navigating a restaurant wine list.

Sure, you can fall back to wines you know, or make semi-educated guesses based on varietal and region. Or, with Vivino, you can just point your phone at the list, and find out about the specifics of every wine on it, based on the collective wisdom of the apps 20+ million users:

We may still be a ways off from living in an episode of Black Mirror, but I suspect we’ll be seeing a steady increase of these single-purpose, phone-based AR tools along the way. Cheers to that.