Science Fiction tech is here, and it’s being used to get people drunk.

Oxegen (one of the huge European music festivals) have released a free iPhone app. It’s currently number one in the Irish app charts, and seems to be instilled with the stuff of magic. Stuff that a few years ago, we were only dreaming would be possible.

Starting from the basics, this app provides a checklist of things to bring to the festival. You can tick things off as you pack them, which is a useful feature. moving to the slightly more complex, it incorporates artist twitter feeds and an RSS feed from the festival organizers. It also provides live traffic updates throughout the weekend, for those who aren’t camping. Then things become cool.

There is a fairly standard map built into the app. It can locate you using the phone’s GPS, and shows you where the stages, campsites, places to get your beers cooled and so on can be found, and direct you too them. You can turn your iPhone sideways, and see everything in Virtual Reality mode, for those you are useless at even iPhone assisted directions. You can also, in a blindingly simple yet stunningly obvious move, tag where your tent is, and your iPhone will show you the way, even late at night.

Another “Holy Shit It’s 2010″ feature is the Interactive Event Schedule. You tell it what bands you want to see, and it informs you of any overlapping performances. Sure, that’s ordinary enough. HOWEVER, just before the bands begin their set, it uses push notifications to inform you, and can then show you to the correct stage within the time needed to get there. That’s pretty awesome.

I have, however, saved the best for last.

Since Oxegen is such a huge place, it is very easy to loose your friends. The app can help out with that. Heading into the Settings area (strangely inside the app instead of in the iPhone settings area) you will notice an area to turn on “share my location”. If you do that, once the festival starts, it will show your friends (connected through facebook, at the moment, and you can choose only to show specific ones) exactly where you are on the festival site. Updated in real time. On the map. Now THAT’S magic. The one possible worry I have over this feature is that some smart thief somewhere might be able to work out where iPhone users have pitched their tent, and may have a night time visit. I’m not sure how well they protect the location data.

I will be at Oxegen from this Thursday, so if you are going and want to say hello, feel free to track me down. Send me an email/comment or something.

Anyway, this app got me thinking. What other “The Future Is Now” things can we take for granted right now? Every time I see a 32gb my jaw drops. These things are about the size of your thumbnail, and look at how much data can fit on them! The Microsoft Courier was another of these Future Tech products, but sadly never got past the R&D stage. It would have blown the iPad out of the water.

Can you think of any other pieces of tech that make you feel like we are living in Star Trek?

Tags: app, festival, iPhone, Music festival, Oxegen