A promising new Twitter client for the iPhone has been released that is making a compelling pitch for augmented reality. As you can see from the video, it keeps tabs on geotagged tweets and lets you see them overlaid onto the image viewed from your iPhone’s camera. If the camera is facing the ground, it switches to a compass mode that points an arrow towards nearby tweets. For those a little farther away, you can see international tweets on a Google Maps layer, but of course you can also go to the traditional timeline to see everyone you’re following in a traditional chronological list. Twitter released official geolocation APIs a little over a month ago, so this AR interface should work with folks tweeting from any client that leverages them. Considering how few twitter users are yet to plug into geolocation right now, I would really like to have the option to see the public timeline in AR view just to see what random strangers in my area are talking about.
Personally, I’m a big fan of augmented reality, and based on other AR apps in recent memory, it seems like twitter will remain at the forefront of this new category of mobile software. If you’d like to give Twitter 360 a shot on your iPhone 3GS, you can download it from iTunes here for $2.99, or check out their page for a closer look at the app.
[via Presselite]