I’ve been familiarising myself with a new phone over the last couple of days – Google and HTC’s answer to Apple’s iPhone, the HTC G2 otherwise known as the ‘Magic’. It has some amazing features, but there’s one application I want to focus on in particular, which I have recently downloaded.
Believe me, ‘Wikitude‘ will delight and amaze you and your friends. To put it simply, what Wikitude does is pair the phone’s camera with the built-in Global Positioning System (GPS) and then overlays the live video coming from the camera with data taken from Wikipedia (for landmarks etc) and from Qype (for restaurants, pubs and so on). What you get as a result is a real-time visual representation on the screen of where things of interest are nearby. You can even change the scale to show you things within say, 1km, or all the way out to 7.5km.
If there’s one caveat, I doubt that it’s going to be of much use somewhere where there isn’t much meaningful data, such as in the middle of Dartmoor, but in London I’m sure that I’m going to find it absolutely invaluable I wonder what I’m going to discover next?
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