Exciting day today, not just because today is the first Augmented Planet meet-up in London at 6pm but Junaio has finally hit the iPhone store. I have been waiting for Junaio for a while, refreshing the store every few hours in the hope that it appears, finally the wait is over. Junaio is different to the other augmented reality browsers applications in the store as rather than tell you where the nearest whatever is located, Junaio is focused on social networking, 3D and fun.

The applications history lies in a product from Metaio called iLiving. The idea is you have a space you want to fill with furniture, you take a picture of the space and then select from a list of stock items like tables, chairs, plants etc and place them in the photo to see how they would look. Junaio takes that concept a lot further, now you can take picture of anywhere, chose from an exhaustive list of animated 3D images to add to your photo and share your creations.

To create your scene just snap the background and then add and position the 3D characters you want to include, you’re not limited to just images as you can also link a twitter account and see the latest twitter message displayed in real-time.  Once you have created your master piece you can publish it to Facebook, save it as a photo or publish it to Junaio.

Publishing to Junaio is where you’ll have the most fun. Posting your master piece and then swapping to ‘Live’ turns on the augmented reality browser functionality and shows you what other users have published in the same area so you’ll be able to compare creations. I’m sure over the next few weeks we are going to be seeing a fair number of dinosaurs around Big Ben or flying over London.

It’s good to see something different to the usual local search browsers and Junaio is certainly different bring in a real fun viral element, it’s pretty addictive and you’ll soon find yourself walking around snapping away looking to create new scenes.

Here is a couple of images I took this morning.

Download Junaio here : itunes.apple.com/us/app/junaio/id337415615
Visit the website: www.junaio.com
Watch the video: www.youtube.com/user/metaioAR#p/a/u/2/2_fYcdH2nMY
Get updates on the junaio community: junaio.wordpress.com/

If you are at the Augmented Planet event tonight we’ll do a demo of Junio and test out creating a scene linked to twitter. Tickets for the event have all gone with around 100 augmented reality enthusiasts dropping by.

PS the Chumby competition is coming, I’m having email problems preventing me making the competition live but hopefully that will be sorted today.

Related posts you may like:

1. Layar and Junaio News Catch-up
2. Augmented Reality Property Search With Junaio
3. ScavengAR and Junaio
4. Junaio 2.0 Now An Augmented Reality Browser
5. Metaio change the game with junaio glue