Augmented Planet » Application

Find a second hand cAR: Autotrader on the iPhone

Nitin — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 14:56:55 +0000

So I think that everyone who’s watched any TV over the last year or so have seen a whole raft of adverts such as those from CarSpotter. These companies provide you with details of vehicles by simply submitting the registration to them via SMS. They then respond via premium SMS and charge you for the information provided, typically the average value of the car and its performance.

Well this week, AutoTrader have enhanced their iPhone application by adding augmented reality and allowing users to gain similar information and do much more, see the video below:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=-6g_1g8IRG4

Here is the iTunes description:

The Auto Trader Mobile application lets you use your iPhone’s camera to search for information about a car you like whenever and wherever you are. As well as being a new way to find out about the vehicles you like our app lets you search for similar cars for sale around you.

- Take a picture of a car’s number plate and we’ll find you Auto Trader expert reviews and technical specs to match the make and model. Isn’t that clever?

- Search for similar cars for sale around you, compare prices and models available to buy based on your location.

- Store the cars you’re interested in and any photos you’ve taken in your app’s Garage to make them easy to find later.

You can also look for cars the usual way, searching over 300,000 cars for sale on Auto Trader. Once you find the car you like it’s easy to call or email the seller straight from the app. Our iPhone app simply makes it easier to search, compare and store cars you like.

Let the world around you inspire your car search. Auto Trader – the world of cars made easy.

Here at Augmented Planet, Lester thought that this app could be the inspiration for a great game; race around with the cars that you find, search for cars of higher specs to have faster cars. If this were to be mixed with something like Ovi Maps Racing, this would be an all round AR experience – race around your local area, with cars that you have in your garage!

The application is available free from iTunes appstore here.

Tiger Beer for the iPhone

lester — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 11:51:46 +0000

If you have ever been to China Town you’ll know just how overwhelming it is, fortunately to celebrate Chinese New Year Exposure have released a Tiger beer promotional iPhone application that will highlight local bars that sell Tiger beer, give you costs so you can figure out which is the cheapest and reviews so you’ll know which is the nicest.

Like all augmented reality applications we have seen, it has an AR view, hold the device up and see the results in the camera view, or see them in a map. Nothing new there. But it seems that advertisers are finally catching on to the whole concept of augmented reality as a branding platform.

Tiger beer also comes with a game to encourage users to interact with the application more and not just when they are thirsty. As I installed the application I accepted the ability to receive push notifications, so I’m assuming that next time I am out and about in London’s West End I’ll get relevant offers delivered.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=782JdQ_kbjw

The game incidentally is not an augmented reality game but is kind of fun nether the less.

If you have a China Town near you and you want to do a bit of exploring, you can install from here: TigerBeer

Wikitude World Browser Update – Quick Look

lester — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 23:03:48 +0000

The iPhone update to the Wikitude World Browser has just hit the appstore. So here is a very early look at whats new.

Firstly upon loading you are presented with a new list of search criteria which includes:

Booking.com - European hotel reservation
Wikipedia
Qype - local reviews on services around you
World Heritage List - Cultural and natural heritage listings
Webcams.travel - collection of webcams
English Premier League - locations of premier league teams stadium’s
City Search - Search cities for entertainment and dining
EPER 2004 - details from the European Pollutant Emissions Register
Twitter - Nearby tweets
Wikitude.Me – your bookmarked POIS
Bordatlas
Flickr
Youtube
Google Local
Planes – spot flights
F1 Racecourses 2009
Panoramico - photo sharing
Last.fm – gigs taking place around you
Yahoo Upcoming - community event’s taking place around you

It’s good to see 3rd party POIs being supported and easily found. It’s also good to see that there is support for both KM and Miles which has been my pet gripe. The new version also allows you to control the number of POIs shown at any time, however there is stil the issue of the application not remembering your previous selections. So every time you start the app it defaults back to the maximum distance and default set of POIs.

There is a good mix of POIs, the first POI I tried was the Planes and had a good chuckle to myself. The only flight found was Sewage. I’m pretty sure I am flying them to Barcelona next week. The EPER POI throws up an interesting list of who around you is putting pollutants in to the environment and I was surprised to see that even in the middle of nowhere where I live there are offenders.

I’m not sure how I manage to break things but I hit upon a few bugs.

1) The camera option disappeared a few times while choosing the POI. It meant that I could select POIs but I couldn’t turn on the camera without closing and restarting the app

2) I found a repeatable crash with the English premier league POI. Enable the POI, select any item in the camera view then select Web and the app crashes.

Overall it’s a nice update and good to see the inclusion of more POIs and the ability for developers to easily add their own.

Ultimate Guide To iPhone Augmented Reality Part II

lester — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 13:02:54 +0000

Continuing with the ultimate list of augmented reality applications for the iPhone. So far we have seen augmented reality applications that will help you find your car, get the HEX value of any colour you happen to point your camera at, track satellites and learn about the constellations and locations of the planets.

Compasses
I tested my iPhone compass against an Androids compass a few days back. Lets just say that should I find myself in the wild miles from anywhere I pray that I have a real compass with me.

Compass Apps
Reality Compass
Compass AR
AR Compass
lodestone AR Compass
TWCompass
ArCompassLite
GeoGeo
ARSensors

Various AR compass applications

Compasses don’t have to be simple NORTH, SOUTH indicators, there are a few that have real world overlays (fancy way of saying there is a small map on the screen)

VisualMap
HeadsUp navigator

When we get real augmented reality glasses no doubt it will come with a HUD, we’ll all be mini Terminators. Instantly we’ll know the location, distance and elevation of where we parked. If you can’t wait here are the HUDs that are available.

HUD displays
Theodolite
iHUD
Spyglass

Interested in mountain ranges?

Peaks
World Peaks
Peak.ar
Look Around
Panoramascope

WorldTags- see how far countries are away from your location.
Transparent Earth – ever wondered what is on the opposite site of the world from you?
Real Ski - the first augmented reality trail app for ski resorts. If you can ski down a mountain holding your iPhone in front of you and using it to navigate then you are one cool dude.
Sun Seeker Lite – when will the sun rise, when is the summer solstice? wonder no more

Still loads more application to come!

Ultimate Guide To iPhone Augmented Reality Part I

lester — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 17:20:28 +0000

All the apps from the appstore

The number of augmented reality applications for the iPhone has grown significantly since I started this blog. The guys over at TechCrunchies say that in 2009 there were over 1 million augmented reality applications downloaded. By 2014 that figure is expected to rise to a staggering 400 million. 30% of that is expected to be generated by downloads of augmented reality games. Check out the TechCrunchies website for more interesting data.

With those numbers now is a good time to be thinking about releasing an augmented reality application, but what’s out there in the appstore already? Searching the appstore for ‘augmented reality’ used to produce a single page of results, these days there are hundreds of apps all fighting for your attention and hard earned pennies. We thought we would take a look and see what applications are available. Welcome to part one of the ultimate guide to iPhone augmented reality applications.

We ignored the official appstore categories, some developers listed their applications in the strangest categories in an attempt to find consumers. To make it more of a level playing field we have done a bit of rejigging.

Eduction
There are quite a few apps that call themselves augmented reality educational apps, but when you dig deeper some are little more than utilities. For example there is an app that tells you what is on the opposite side of the planet from your current location. Interesting yes, educational no.

After arranging the categories somewhat we found very few ‘real’ educational augmented reality applications.

Pocket Universe
Star Chart

Both applications are astronomy applications that show the constellations and locations of the planets, both cost $2.99. My personal favourite here is Pocket Universe. Pocket Universe has a cool feature that uses augmented reality and the compass to help you find your target. If you’re interested in finding Jupiter and you need help, just select the relevant option and you’ll be guided to the target by arrows. It works well for bright objects but for objects that are either really dim or where you’ll need a telescope it’s not very useful as it can be a few feet off.

Learn about the cosmos with augmented reality star finders

Utilities
I always wanted an application to see where the satellites are, not for any particular reason just out of curiosity. If you install satellites for a living then you have a few apps available but they are expensive (as much as $19.99). Given the accuracy of Pocket Universe and its ability to pinpoint an object I’m not sure that I would rely on an application to complete an installation. They will help point you in the right direction but you’ll still need a sat bleeper to complete the install and tweak the signal.

DishPointer
DishPointer AR Pro
Satellite Augmented Reality
Satellite Sliderule Pro

: Find a satellite

If you have problems remembering where you left your car then there are a couple of apps that can help you.
iParking find my car (free)
Car Finder
cARLocator
iFindit AR
icar Augmented reality

Dude Where's My Car?

It’s worth pointing out that the acrossair augmented reality browser has the ability to locate your car as well.

A couple of misc utilities:

AugMeasure
If you’re stuck without a tape measure then AugMeasure will give you a virtual measure. It’s free so good for estimates but don’t go out and by new carpet based on it’s measurements.

Color i
Interesting application that will give you the hex/rgb color value of objects you point the camera at.

It's Orange but what shade?

C2 YouTube
GeoTag your YouTube videos

Music
Someone will need to educate me on augmented music, I’m not convinced. Light Squares puts squares you can press into the real world view, and that’s about it.

Trippy
RjDj
Kids on DSP
Little Boots
Light Squares
That’s it for part one, still plenty of more apps to come.

Layar For The iPhone Is Here

lester — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 15:01:16 +0000

Yesterday saw one of the augmented reality browsers heavy weights finally come to the iPhone. I first got to play with Layar a few months back on a friends HTC Hero, he came to the pub to tell me about his fantastic new phone, I was just waiting for him to hand it over so I could install Layar and give it a go.

Layar if you don’t know is billed as the worlds first augmented reality browser (I’m sure the Wikitude guys would contest that). With Layar you can search for interesting things around you, eg restaurants and see their relative position in the camera view. As you move the camera around the list of restaurants will change to reflect what is in front of you. With Layar you can search for just about anything and once you find what you are looking for, clicking it will either give you more info eg address, telephone number, or directions on how to get there.

One of the big reasons for getting Layar is the ability to add specialist points of interest or layers as they are called, and anyone can create a layer and publish it for other Layar users to use. As of today there are 155 layers listed on the Layarwebsite with around 30 available for use in the UK. Layar will filter irrelevant country content so it wont be available. Unless you are in Japan you probably won’t want to know about real estate for sale in Kobe, so the filtering works really well. Once you have found layers that you like you can add them to your favorites so they are always there and in easy reach. New layers will appear in the application automatically in either the popular or featured section so be sure to look in their often.

The initial list of 3rd party layers available in the UK is pretty varied covering tube stations, hotels, theaters, twitters, wikipedia and more. And of course don’t forget with the Layar local search you can find anything so the posibilities are endless. There are some layers that I would still like to see, Pubs and ATMs would be a great addition, but the one that intrigues me the most is the Schiphol flights layer for flights around Amsterdam. I maybe reading to much into that one but being able to point my iPhone at a plane and know that is an A320 from New York at 20,000 ft landing in London would be the coolest thing ever. The developer is Dutch but I did manage to dig around and find another of their projects which shows live flight information around Amsterdam, their Layar plugin is based on this project: http://casper.frontier.nl

Layar has been a longtime coming to the iPhone and now it’s here it was definitely worth the wait. Layar has certainly been one of the most eagerly anticipated augmented reality applications for sometime and so far the feedback in the appstore has been positive, but I hear one or two grumblings about accuracy. My usage has been pretty good, it’s not spot on but it’s not miles out either. The application shows you the accuracy to expect at all times so either some people are missing the accuracy indicator or have too high expectations. Layar is well worth installing and could be the only augmented reality app you’ll ever need.

Augmented London – The New iPhone App

lester — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 12:07:14 +0000

Bank holiday here in the UK today, so the wife has decided to paint the living room. I have been up hours taking down curtains, shelves and trying to get up the enthusiasm to take down my plasma tv before she tries to paint around it. Wife on the other hand is complaining about the shade of green paint she I brought. I’m told the one she I brought is the wrong shade. Green looks green to me.

It seems that no matter what city you are in, there is an augmented reality application to help you find the nearest underground station, I guess it was only a matter of time before someone decided ‘what about buses’, and here we have the London Buses iPhone application.

I avoid travelling on buses so fortunately the application also tells you the location of the nearest underground stations as well, subject to a upgrade fee. Like Layar you can also download other POIs to find interesting things around you, but unlike Layar the application doesn’t look extensible for you to build you own plug-ins, and again unlike Layar POIs are not free, if you want to find your nearest wifi zone, restaurant, Starbucks etc then you’ll need to purchase the POI from the appstore via an in-application download.

While there are other augmented reality applications that do similar things and are free, how does the application justify charging? Well there are a few nice touches, for instance you are able to see the tube status so know how the trains are running, or see what sights are on the bus route so you can be ready with your camera. Sure there is bound to be a free iPhone application that tells you the tube status already but do you really want to have 10 apps installed when you can have 1 that does it all?

Touching on the fact that POIs are chargeable for a second, I do think this is the way things will go. Free software only you takes you so far before the investors start wondering where the return on their investment is.

There is a bit of confusion over the actual integration with the bus routes, the home page states that it has all the main bus stations in central London. Bus stations and bus stops are very different things, I live near a bus stop but the bus station is miles away. Since one of the features allows you to type in an address and find out the best way to reach your destination, either by bus or by train I am assuming that they do have bus stop level information and that the difference in terminology is a cultural thing.

Product features:

The map includes the key bus routes in central London, and provides all the best sights and attractions that the city has to offer.
The main bus stations of central London are available.
Precise location of each station on the map (with a red circle), and also on Google Map.
A bookmark manager allows you to save your stations and routes.
The trip planner tool allows you to find automatically the best route to get to your destination with London Buses. Travel time is also estimated.
Interactive map to choose your stations for the route.
The route planner included in this application does not require a network connection to operate.
The application locates the nearest Bus stations from your position in London.
You can provide an address in London, the application indicates the stations closest to that address.
London Tube Service updates (Live travel news) are available.
The application is available in English, French, Spanish, Deutsch and Japanese.

There is demo video on YouTube, but to be honest it’s not that good. Filmed on a bright sunny day making it almost impossible to see what is going on and no commentary.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=B_OPrXNt1og

Visit the official website here.

Hidden iPhone Augmented Reality Feature

lester — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 11:24:11 +0000

The world this morning appears to have gone crazy for a hidden augmented reality Easter egg feature in the Yelp iPhone application. Yelp is a Yellow Pages type service who yesterday launched a mobile application for the iPhone to enable you to search for local business on your phone. Today we hear that they have managed to sneak a hidden Easter egg past Apple that unlocks an augmented reality feature to overlay your search results on the camera screen.

The application is very Layar like in that you tell it what you are interested in, eg a bar and it overlays the search results on the camera screen and gives you a handy compass so you can find your nearest target.

To activate the hidden augmented reality feature, install the Yelp application from the app store, shake your iPhone 3 times and if successful you will get a blue box indicating that a new feature called Monocle has been unlocked. Now you should be able to overlay the search results.

Yelp application in action
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m9KiSTTIenY

To activate the feature you need to shake the iPhone 3 times, I had to laugh, how hard can shaking your iPhone 3 times be?

Shake it to activate it
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3VcBo5unNkc

I’m wondering if Yelp did sneak this past Apple, if they did I wondered how long it will be before the application is pulled from the store?

ARound – New Version

lester — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 13:26:24 +0000

Monday morning again. I hope you all had a top weekend. You might see the blog theme misbehaving a little over the next few days. I am making some changes and odd things happen as plugin’s are enabled/disabled during testing. Until then bear with me a bit if posts look a bit untidy, they’ll look better in the new theme.

The guys over at Sequence Point have released an update to the beta of ARound for Symbian devices.

It’s begining to look a bit more polished so well worth taking a look.

ARound supports the following devices:

S60 3rd edition FP2 (Nokia 6210 Navigator, N86)
S60 5th edition (Nokia N97)

And like Layar for the Google Android it is designed to be extensible and allows for 3rd parties to build plugins to extend the functionality.

To download visit here: seqpoint.com/beta-labs/69

Try The AR CannonBallz Game

lester — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 09:43:30 +0000

From the same people that brought you the AR Shopper application comes CannonBallz.
The premise of the game is simple, visit the webpage, allow the application to use your webcam then dodge the cannon balls that are fired at you from the pirate ships.

A rather nice touch to promote the game virally is you can save your high score to Facebook.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=KMKv3tk2Rys

Try the game here:

ARound for the Nokia N97

lester — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 08:36:47 +0000

Nokia owners rejoice, at least if you are a N97 owner. Over the last few months every AR application has been for the iPhone or Android devices and no doubt you have started to feel a bit left out. Of course Symbian device up until now haven’t had a compass so it makes it difficult to do anything as cool as Layar or the find the nearest tube applications.

The ARound project from SequencePoint Software is the first such application for Symbian devices and aims to fill the gap by providing a prototype augmented reality application for users.

Features

Use of Data Source plugins, which allows third-party developers to add their own sources of information. (Details for plug-in development will be made available soon)
Display different details of each point of interest, including hiperlinks to external resources.
Being a pluggable component makes it possible for third-party developers to include it as a customized view into their applications

Go here to read more and to download the N97 sis file

Augmented Reality Demos To Install And Try

lester — Fri, 01 May 2009 08:52:57 +0000

The most impressive augmented reality demos I have seen to date have come from the guys at HIT Lab NZ. Not only have they been doing fantastic stuff, but unlike a lot of the demos out there which are just YouTube videos, HIT Lab’s give you applications to install and play around with.

So if you want to impress a few of your friends this weekend, how about installing a few of these.

Demos for your mobile

Virtual Tennis (1 or 2 player)

www.youtube.com/watch?v=r-Ya293u34c

Install

Supports

Nokia N82
Nokia N95
Nokia N95-3NAM
Nokia N95-8GB
Nokia 6120 Classic
Nokia 6121 Classic
Nokia N81
Nokia N81 8GB

Virtual Fanta Crew – 3 characters to chose from
Try changing the size of the marker for bigger or smaller characters

www.youtube.com/watch?v=jIWV_Myx2dc

Install

Supports

Nokia N82
Nokia N95
Nokia N95-3NAM
Nokia N95-8GB
Nokia 6120 Classic
Nokia 6121 Classic
Nokia N81
Nokia N81 8GB
Nokia 6124 Classic
Nokia 6110 Navigator
Nokia 6210 Navigator
Nokia N79
Nokia N85
Nokia N92
Nokia N93
Nokia N93i
Nokia N71
Nokia N75
Nokia N76
Nokia N77

Demo for your desktop

ARTetris

www.youtube.com/watch?v=8yDylS_Q4Lo

Install

Wikitude and the augmented reality hype cycle

lester — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 08:13:14 +0000

Floating around on Twittersphere this morning is a very interesting article on the augmented reality hype cycle. (read here)

The article that breaks down the technology in to 4 stages:

Level 0 – Physical World Hyper Linking
Level 1 – Marker Based AR
Level 2 – Markerless AR
Level 3 – Augmented Vision

Right now we are around level 2 with mobile applications beginning to use markerless AR. A good example or markerless AR is the Wikitude application for the Google Android G1 device.

It looks like a great application if you are a traveller.

Wikitude
Wikitude is a mobile travel guide for the Android platform based on location-based Wikipedia and Qype content. It is a handy application for planning a trip or to find out about landmarks in your surroundings; 350,000 world-wide points of interest may be searched by GPS or by address and displayed in a list view, map view or cam view.

Wikitude AR Travel Guide Part 1

www.youtube.com/watch?v=8EA8xlicmT8

Wikitude AR Travel Guide Part 2

www.youtube.com/watch?v=tpaJBu4BEuA

More
Application home page
Install from here

At the moment the Google Android device appears to be hogging all the augmented reality limelight. With some of the new super powerful Symbian based devices coming out later this year I hope all that will change.

Have you used it?
If you have used the Wikitude application? I’m sure we’d all be intrested in hearing more