iPhone 3GS displaying the Nearest Tube app
While I’m still feeling some pangs of guilt about my recent desertion from the Windows Mobile platform and my conversion to the iPhone 3GS, those pangs are becoming less frequent and less painful the more I use my iPhone (it’s magnificent) and I become more and more convinced that the platform currently offers by far the best apps, and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future.
One such app is the soon to be released Nearest Tube from acrossair. The app shows the user their nearest tube station via their iPhone’s video function. With the iPhone held flat, all 13 lines of the London underground are displayed in coloured arrows. By tilting the phone upwards, the user will see the nearest stations: what direction they are in relation to the user’s current location, how many miles away they are, and what tube lines the stations are on. As the user continues to tilt the phone upwards, they see stations further away, as stacked icons. Take a look below at acrossair’s demo video on YouTube.
As well as being a great iPhone app, this also seems to be a genuinely useful application of the concept of augmented reality, one of the hottest buzz phrases of the moment. To me, most of the augmented reality applications currently being showcased in the digital media area seem to be undeniably eye-catching but pretty shallow from a purely functional perspective. I’ve never been able to imagine finding something like BMW’s Z4 AR microsite as the killer-app for the technology. In fact, I began to fear that augmented reality might suffer the fate of becoming merely a plaything of marketing and communications.
Thankfully, then, I think Nearest Tube shows just what can be usefully achieved using augmented reality on a digital media platform; to me, it feels more like a killer app than acrossair’s previous AR offering on the iPhone, the acrossair browser. I certainly can’t wait for the release of Nearest Tube. And, it’s only available for the iPhone 3GS.
See the app in action below via YouTube, or by following this link to YouTube if the embedded video is not working.
Related reading (from Amazon.co.uk):
- Augmented Reality: A Practical Guide by Stephen Cawood
- New User Interfaces for Mobile Devices Using Augmented Reality by Peter Mihai Antoniac
- Beginning iPhone 3 Development: Exploring the iPhone SDK by Dave Mark, Jeff LaMarche
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It looks like Metro Paris Subway has beaten Nearest Tube to the App Store. Take a look at it – it looks a superb app.