*Boy, none of that mushy social-media collaborative airtagging from these GeoVector guys. Gonna whip some Microsoft Bing right up against the urban landscape. Point and click™ on the real world™.
*Also, you don't have to blob any video overlays onto stuff: just zap at it, and hope for a search hit. I'd be guessing that a lot of AR apps end up sliding out of "AR geek mode" and into the line-command, one-click interface, once the visual novelty fades.
*Or even just a voice command. "Where's a taxi stand?" How hard could that be™?
"POINT THE DEVICE IN ORDER TO:
Place a phone call
Find out when the museum opens
Identify a mountain range
Find an ATM on the way home
Return to your hotel
See a virtual tour of a home for sale
Leave or retrieve post-it messages
Ask for a coupon; make a purchase
See a movie trailer; download a song
Find a safe direction
Locate an enemy (((oh that's the good part))) or clue in game
Automatically label a picture
See a historic spot as it was 200 years ago"
*Check out this demo guy's pink hoodie. Okay, GeoVector has got a Japanese tie-in, but what gives with that wardrobe choice? If I see one more o' those, I'm gonna go buy a pink hoodie.
*This just in: Gene Becker reviews the product.
http://www.genebecker.com/2009/09/hardly-strictly-augmented-reality-geovector-world-surfer/
"I think it’s pretty interesting that GeoVector’s new World Surfer app (that just dropped for iPhone and shortly for Android) doesn’t have any augmented reality eye candy. After all, GeoVector seems to have invented the idea of mobile GPS+compass AR over 10 years ago, and has had a commercial mobile service running in Japan on KDDI since 2006. But this app doesn’t sport any of the floaters, auggies, phycons or general aurora digitalis of graphics (((I'm really enjoying this))) overlaid on the camera’s video view, that we have rapidly come to associate with augmented reality in 2009. I posed the question to GeoVector, and here’s what CEO John Ellenby had to say about it:
“GeoVector’s mission is to link people using a large range of handsets with data about places in the world in the simplest, most efficient manner that can be widely deployed. From our fielded work in Japan it is clear that pointing the phone to filter by direction is the simplest, most straightforward, pedestrian-friendly method of local search with broad appeal. Our upcoming products for US and Europe leverage that experience from Japan, include support for information displayed in camera view and are designed for users who are in an environment which allows them to safely experience virtual enhancement to the images they are seeing. We believe AR mode is an exciting complementary feature to many applications from history tours to real world immersive gaming and introduces strong additional visualization.”
"From where I sit, that basically means “You’re going to like pointing, but stay tuned to this channel, eyepaper fans.” Sweet, the first product is just hitting the streets and already with the teasing.
"A divining rod for information
"So I’ve been testing a pre-release iPhone version of World Surfer. The basic premise of the application is more or less the same as all the other recent entrants in this space: mobile smartphone with GPS and digital magnetometer (compass) knows where you are, knows what direction you are facing, connects to a web service and shows you points of interest (POIs) from a database of georeferenced entities.
"Where it differs is its focus. World Surfer is designed for finding what you are looking for, and then getting you there. It’s not an AR magic lens, but it is a tricorder, or perhaps a divining rod for hidden information. You point in the direction you are headed, you browse one of the local channels like Bing, Yahoo, and Wikipedia, scope out the restaurant or attraction you want to go to, and World Surfer shows you the way. Literally, a big red arrow shows you ..."
