So this a little bit old, but we’re just seeing it after Twitter’s chief scientist Abdur Chowdhury (who came over in the Summize acquisition last year) tweeted about it last week. Check out the video at the bottom of this post for TwittARound, a new augmented reality Twitter app for the iPhone 3GS. It looks pretty damn slick.
While there are no shortage of Twitter iPhone apps out there, this one is different because it uses a combination of the device’s camera and the iPhone 3GS’s compass feature. Basically, you fire up the app and it opens your device’s camera lens, allowing you to see whatever you’re pointing the device at. Overlaid on this live image are icons of Twitter users to show those in close proximity to you who are tweeting. And below the camera is a Twitter feed of those people’s updates.
But what’s really cool is that when you move the iPhone around, the compass recognizes you’re turning and loads new tweets based on the direction you’re pointed in. It also shows how far away those people are.
It is also, apparently, not a native iPhone app. Instead, TwittARound is built with WebKit, using the new version of Safari Mobile’s 3D CSS transforms, according to the developer on his blog i.document. Why not build a native app? Here’s what he has to say:
After writing some native iPhone apps this Webkit approach seems to be ideal for rapid development of applications independent of the iPhone UI.
That sounds like something Google might say.
But there’s a potential hiccup with this: Apple. Technically, using the open camera lens (basically, live video) as your background apparently only semi-conforms to the iPhone SDK. But there’s a petition from a bunch of developers making AR apps, for Apple to fully support this.
I just pointed mine towards the floor and it showed @scobleizer.
Awesome
So now you can have people actually following you? Where do I sign up?!
It’s the same reason apple rejected my app that used the phonegap api. Interestingly, in their email they said they are communicating with phonegap developers to allow the framework. Wonder when they’re going to come up with a decision.
I am not sure it’s too accurate though. The tweets on Twitter today are not individually tagged by location.
So, if the location on a person’s Twitter account says “San Francisco, CA”, then it doesn’t matter where he goes and tweets from, the tweet will always appear to come from the center of San Francisco.
Twitter needs to enable per-tweet location tagging for this to be useful at all.
Even with that, it will still be a useless app, except maybe for stalkers, but we know how much Twitter values security, right?
Anyway, since this experiment is most likely going to be free (if it passes muster with the API police at Apple), I’ll check it out just for the fun of it, before I making it wiggle into oblivion again.
That’s true, though Safari has access to location, so maybe it could bypass Twitter altogether for that info — but yeah, that would require everyone using that app or another like it that bypasses Twitter’s static location features.
Even though Safari has location awareness (with HTML5 etc.) , the Twitter API does not accept a location when I post a tweet. There is just one location right now – the one in my profile.
Brightkite supports location on every post. We’ve been dabbling with an AR app of our own, but we’d love to see Brightkite support in this app, too
Reminds me of the phone app from “Eden of the East.”
Is the link to the petition broken or is it just me?
http://www.tech...-thinks-so-too/
Really, what is this useful for?
Other than the novelty, come on now…
The technology is cool, but this isn’t something that someone would use other to impress their non-iPhone friends.
“It is also, apparently, not a native iPhone app.”
Wrong. This is a native iPhone app that incorporates a Webkit component to take advantage of Safari Mobile’s 3D CSS transforms and JQuery, which are easier to code for.
Essentially the developer has embedded the Mobile Safari browser in a native SDK app. The SDK makes it easy to do this. He had to write a native app because the Mobile Safari API does not provide access to the camera.
Yeah, and if it wasn’t a native app then Apple wouldn’t have to “play along and approve”.
there is an augmented reality tube map and no doubt several dating apps ready to roll. Although this isnt available inthe public API so shouldnt really appear on iTunes.
But iTunes is not the end all, we are seeing 40% usage on some of our apps from cracked apps
the apps that the little pirate boys are putting up on blogs and cydia. So seems a lot of cracked handsets out there.
So is this a 1st person shooter game for taking out twitter spammers and tracking that data with real time stats?
hey, what is the petition link? the one in the article is broken. I’ll sign it!
Way sick app. I love the way it moves to find the tweeters. Too bad the Iphone camera feature isn’t at its peak yet.
I like the concept of this app. Using Safari instead of making a native app yet still using Apple’s API’s is a first for me. At least for a full-fledged app.
With 2.0 and 3.0 upgrades, Apple has added tons of features to the web development API’s. You can get location data now too! (as of 3.0). You can also use SQLLite databases to store content for offline use. And, you can bookmark the WebApps and have them open without the Safari controls.
These features have sort of gone by without notice because everyone has been so interested in native apps. I think that’s pointless because on the desktop platform, most applications we use are actually web based. It should be the same on the iPhone. Most applications now a days are built around the web, so it just makes it more complicated when your want it to be a native app.
My prediction is that this will be the next generation of mobile apps. Technically, they could keep things like the App store… it’s just there are way more developers who specialize in web development!
Anyways… looks cool! By the way, what does Apple have against using live camera data as a background image???
Link broken!
Link to petition is broken:
“But there’s a petition from a bunch of developers making AR apps, for Apple to fully support this.”
Wow, I am famous now
Thanks for mentioning me!
Here is another take on this same subject, Augmented Reality on iPhone