Now that the iPhone OS 3.1 is officially official, the iPhone 3GS is free to play around with all sorts of cool AR apps. One of the coolest new augmented reality apps for iPhone is Robotvision. The iPhone AR app uses Bing’s new Bring iPhone SDK to help iPhone 3GS users to find nearby Tweets, geo-tagged Flickr photos and places of interest. Robotvision uses Yelp and Citysearch info to give the user the crowd-sourced lowdown on restaurants and businesses.
AR, or augmented reality, is a new way to explore the world around you. Rather than show you a completely virtual mockup of the world around you, augmented reality technology takes a real-world view of the world (through the iPhone 3GS’s camera) and overlays location-data on top. What you get is a cameraview of the world that shows you interesting places of interest in the direction that your iPhone 3GS camera is pointed.
What Robotvision does is overlay restaurant and business information onto your iPhone 3GS cameraview. The app sources Bing, so you’ll have to get over your uneasiness about cheating on Google. Once you get comfortable with your Bing tryst, you can view nearby places of interest through Robotvision’s AR eye. Tilt your iPhone 3GS towards the ground and Robotvision switches to a map view of your current location, showing your restaurant and business locations as pins on the map. When you find something interesting, simply tap the place of interest to get reviews of the business, the address and even make a phone call.
Twitter and Flickr fans will be happy to hear that Robotvision also display nearby Tweets and geo-tagged Flickr photos on your cameraview. We’re not sure how useful those two features will be in day-to-day use, but they definitely add value to an already impressive AR app.
Grab Robotvision for $0.99 on the AppStore.
Robotvision (iTunes link)
[Via: TechCrunch]