The concept is simple, point your phone at the horizon and look at your screen to get more information about your surroundings. Rafael Spring and Max Braun wrote a program Enkin for Google’s Android that does just that as their submission to the Android Developer Challenge.
Enkin from Enkin on VimeoThe navigation app’s ace card is its “live mode,” which combines a plethora of sensory data — camera input, GPS, directional information, motion detection — to show the user an augmented view of what they’re actually looking at in their environment. Augmented with what, exactly? Placemarkers that indicate landmarks, that’s what, and the possibilities are pretty endless — restaurants in the immediate vicinity, a gentle reminder of your car’s location in the parking lot, the list goes on. Nokia’s been toying with this concept for a good long while now but they’ve failed to commercialize it, so here’s hoping will finally see a usable product on a retail device.With the recent announcement that KML is now an official standard for marking up maps I can totally see a future where you can grab different data depending on your situation to overlay on your world or even share the data you created with your private friends or even the world! Enough hypothesizing, check out what these two guys did below and don’t forget to download the PDF saying how they did it.
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