Motivated by the year of astronomy (and also by my interest in augmented reality), I took a look at some of the first applications haveiong a kind of augmented reality on the iPhone: astronomy apps. I found these four which support the use of the compass and accelerometer to show the user on the display what (s)he is pointing the iPhone at. (more…)
I just tried out a new iPhone application called Pocket Universe: Virtual Sky Astronomy.
This is the first real augmented reality application on the iPhone 3GS. It uses the compass and tilt sensors to automatically turn the view of the night sky and shows the corresponding information.
It seems minimally buggy, especially when the tilt reaches certain angles, but it is an awesome proof-of-concept and shows what is possible with this hardware. After you see this, it’s easy to imagine other augmented reality applications, which also use the camera for additional input.
Soon, people will have this second layer of information at their fingertips. Now if only someone would bring out something like this for the iPhone….
I got my iPhone 3GS yesterday, and so I thought I should post my first impressions of the device and the updated software.
First and foremost, if you are used to the older 3G hardware, the speed and responsiveness will blow you away. There is no more lag, not even when playing some of the more graphics intensive games, the keyboard got rid of those annoying hangs and the new oleophobic touch screen stays much cleaner.
The second thing that blew me away was the user interface for the camera. Touch to focus works amazing.
The compass seems to work even better than the digital compass on my Garmin Oregon handheld GPS. The GPS reciever itself is as good or bad as in the previous model.
The iPhone OS itself is a solid improvement and optimization. Copy and paste seems to work great. I did not have many opportunities to test it, but it was handy for copying a strong password from 1password to Safari.
All in all a great device. I can only recommend it to everyone who does not absolutely need a physical keyboard (besides, the touch keyboard allows different layouts for muli-language users like myself).
I’ll post more in-depth comments later on. Most of this article was written on my iPhone via the Wordpress App, which does not seem to work correctly with the current Wordpress version – does anyone know about that or is that an error on my part?