Posted 12.02.2009 at 9:24 am
6 Comments
This way to the Tweeter!
via Presselite
Like most Internet applications, Twitter connects you with people who seem to exist in a vast, abstract, cyberspace. Now, a new iPhone app from the French company Presselite uses augmented reality to show you exactly where your friends are tweeting from.
The app takes advantage of Twitters new geotagging feature that lets tweeters identify their address. The app then displays either an avatar of the tweeter, or an arrow pointing to them, and indicates how far away they are.
Whether your hunting down a friend who just tweeted about a hot party, or trying to find a business that just tweeted about a sale, this app melds the abstract, diffuse world of Twitter with the concrete, un-augmented reality we still spend most of our time in. Check out the video below for a more thorough explanation, and a pretty cool demonstration.
[Presselite, via Fast Company]
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coool
from Tiffin, Ohio
I'd be interested to know if there is any kind of block the friend can put in place if they don't want to be found. If there is, there should be a counter block for parents. Like an override.
sounds like the best thing for stalkers, and rapist, muggers,... criminals in general. I can also see the good things it can do like find you if you are lost in the mountains with a signal, oh wait good luck with the signal part.
Seems like nothing but a gimmick to me - that barely works. It got old to me before the video was done playing.
I think the programs on the iPhone which utilize augmented reality should use the camera input as a motion tracker. Combined with the GPS and accelerometer data it should give a more realistic augmentation I feel. If the program read the camera movement based on tracking points in the video feed it could update the position of the overlay much quicker and still use the other methods to continually override and update the camera data. I just feel it would help the lag of position data being received and make it less "jumpy" on screen...
Too bad Twitter is still pointless for anybody but celebrities who like to Tweet about every mundane task they do.