Augmented-reality city guide application for Android
Wikitude is one of ADC (Android Developer Challenge) round 1 winners (that’s round $25k for the author Philipp Breuss).
Wikitude is a web site and there’s a corresponding Wikitude AR Travel Guide Android application. AR stands for augmented reality which is how the application work - augments what the mobile camera sees with additional information. Wikitude can be used as a city guide that leverages information about points of interest (POI) found in Wikipedia that is intersected with GPS information coming from an Android device.
Wikitude takes advantage of geographical information contained in Wikipedia articles. There are about 350.000 Wikipedia POIs to download, split up in many categories and more than 10.000 POI files.
Recently, they have closed a deal with T-Mobile UK, which will bring Wikitude Android application to T-Mobile Android devices sold in UK.
An article at Times Online indicate how it Wikitude beats hands down a human guide.
I wonder how this application compares to Enkin (which I mentioned back in Jun while ago) which is another Android augmented reality application. Interestingly enough, Wikitude AR Travel Guide and Enkin are directly competing applications whereas the first one won one ADC award, while the Enkin authors have been separately contacted by Google (and there are no news what happened next).One is sure, the Android Pandora Box (no pun intended) of augmented reality has been opened.
Stay tuned for more news…
