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Video: Enkin, GPS based augmented reality for Google’s Android

Categories: Linux
By: , IntoMobile
Wednesday, April 16th, 2008 at 4:03 AM

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. 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.


Enkin from Enkin on Vimeo.

[Via: Wireless Watch Japan]

About The Author

Stefan Constantinescu

Stefan Constantinescu (@WhatTheBit on Twitter) has loved technology since as far back as he can remember. It started with computers, but in the past few years his passion has turned to mobile devices. As a mobile phone enthusiast who lives and breathes devices that connect to the internet, he knows he is not alone with this radical fascination of all things wireless. He is strongly opinionated and enjoys a good debate so leave comments in his posts and he’ll get back to you! Stefan began blogging as a hobby in the fall of 2006 and joined IntoMobile in the summer of 2007. Later he got a job at Nokia in March 2008, but as of June 2009 he has rejoined the IntoMobile team. He is currently based out of Helsinki, Finland.

  • Andrew

    I think I’ve already seen concepts of stuff like this but none have actually implemented it before. Google need to jump on something like this and make it a standard that can roll out with Android because it’s the sharing part that’s gonna make this take off. It’d be great if I was trying to direct a friend to my house and I could just send him my location using my handset and he could see it in real time like that.

    I assume it’s going to be relying on data from Google Maps to locate buildings and stuff without adding each one manually though. They’ll need to work on that cos last time I checked Google wasn’t that precise in marking the buildings, usually just the street or business park (or in that time I was trying to find a pub in a village, neither).

  • Markus

    That is really impressive.