Nearest Subway App Overlays Subway Directions On the Real World

I've seen it demonstrated on Nokia devices before, but it's more available to the public with an iPhone.

I find it clever that they were able to circumvent one major obstacle of doing augmented reality. Usually, you need to interpret something about the video view from the camera in order to figure out where to place the 3D models in the scene.

Instead, they rendered it entirely ignoring the scene, and just used orientation and distance to display the subway signs. That works great for cities like New York or DC, where it's pretty much a grid with no dead ends.

The best thing about this is how simple it probably is underneath, and how awesome it looks anyways.

Current user location and database of subway station locations. It's a small enough list that you just rip through all of them and sort by distance. Project badges onto a sphere/flat on a circle depending on the tilt of the phone. Orient on compass location. Overlay display on video feed. Done.

There's no fancy image processing going on, no actual pathfinding, just a nice combination of the new 3GS apis and publically-available data. Good show.

So is apple approving apps like this now? I was under the impression that they made use of undocumented APIs, and as such, aren't getting into the app store?

If they are approving them, then I'm getting right on this bandwaggon!

Seems like everyone forgot to mention this app has not yet been approved by the App Store.

But yes, rad nonetheless.

This is an amazingly creative use of all the iPhone technologies, and New York is one of the densest places in the world so this would definitely be very helpful. It's not helpful for locals (who have the lines memorized), but for travelers who get confused and turned around in the maze of skyscrapers... this will be a great help.

I wonder if the technology is easily extensible to take new maps and locations. Post that openly and watch the world start creating further content... not just more subway maps, but more geographical locations (restaurants, hotels etc).

Exciting!

Simply incredible, what devices inside the iphone allow it to extrapolate its position so accurately?