With the release of the new iPhone 3GS, Apple has included a digital compass into the hardware. Alright, but that’s nothing groundbreaking right? The G1 can do it and so do a lot of bog standard GPS devices, it’s how you know what’s North when you’re driving down the high street. But pair the hardware compass to the idea of Augmented Reality (AR) and soon you open a door to a whole new world of possibilities. Literally.
Meet “Nearest Tube”. Not the catchiest name given for an app that’s true, but the first to be released that’ll introduce AR to the iPhone. At it’s core, the puts together the built in compass and the video capability of the iPhone to find you the nearest Tube Station. How does it do this? Well by super imposing the GPS co-ordinates of the nearest tube stations (according to your GPS fix) on top of the video produced by the camera.
By laying the iPhone “flat”, arrows will point to several of the nearest Tube stations to you. Having the iPhone back to vertical, it’ll show you where those stations are. Check out the video which demonstrates the app in action and proves that seeing really is believing.
However, there are some issues with this. The app relies on the digital compass built into the iPhone which in turn relies on magnetism. This is where the problems start. It seems that if you’re close to anything that could even remotely interfere with the compass, it starts to go a little funny. So for example if you’re like me and bored on the bus home and want to mess with the compass, you’ll find yourself having to slowly peel away from the sides of the bus and waving your phone in figure of 8’s in the air just to get a magnetic fix, is not the coolest thing to look at. No word on when we’ll see this in the AppStore but it’s currently in that convoluted approval process so fingers crossed, not long to wait.
Apart from the magnetism issues, this looks to be a winner of an app. More importantly it’ll hopefully entice developers to spend the extra time and effort to develop more AR apps for the platform. We could then begin to see apps where you point your iPhone at a movie poster, it recognising it and then displaying the relevant information and play you the trailers. Or an app whereby plotting a route in Google Maps now gets super imposed onto the path in front of you showing precisely where to go. Who knows? If Apple does release more APIs for the video camera we might just see a whole new evolution in the way we use our mobile phones.
Source: CNET UK: Crave Blog
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=0f7053dc-613b-467c-80fc-8a8a36931440)
