Augmented Reality iPhone

Welcome to a new blog specifically aimed at reviewing Augmented Reality apps on the iPhone platform.  Please take a look at our About page for more details.

A clear view of a better world!™

For our first ever review here at Augmented Reality iPhone I wanted to review an app that, to me, epitomises one of the primary benefits of AR… showing you something you couldn’t see without it.

• • Positioning the solar panels for solar powered garden lights etc.
  • Orienting a pergola or garden seat for shade or sunlight
  • Telling where a house you’re buying gets sun at different times.
  • Picking a shady fishing spot at your favourite lake.

You could do some of these things with just a compass as the Sun always rises in the East and sets in the West but seeing the Sun’s actual path is a bit tricky without time lapse photography.  Also being able to see the trajectory through obstructions and on different dates (more of which later) also adds valuable information.

Here’s what you see when you first enter the app… It shows you a 2D compass (rotating in real time on the 3GS).  A quick tap of [Details] shows sunrise, sunset, daylight duration etc. as you can see in this image.

For the purpose of our solar panel alignment example this could be perfectly adequate; you just point the panel to the position of the Sun at midday and you will get a reasonable amount of sunlight falling on the panel throughout the day.  But just a sec, this is an AR app… what exactly is the use of AR here and does it add value?
Pressing the camera icon in the bottom right hand corner activates the camera, the accelerometer and the compass to give you a view of the Sun’s exact path through the sky projected over buildings and cloud cover. The four pictures below more or less join up to show you the net effect.
The pictures are a few months old so the red line actually shows the Sun’s path in the Summer Solstice (Winter in Blue, actual path in Yellow and Horizon in Green not all visible here).  The yellow Sun icon has a pointer shows which way you should turn to find the Sun so it’s behind me here (the pointer disappears when the Sun is ahead of you).  It was bad news for my solar path light project I found that I was placing the solar panel right in the “Shadow Point” opposite the Sun which would be fantastic in open ground but because our house is behind me its in shadow most of the day.  But since that’s where the path I’m lighting is I don’t have a choice but I was able to alter the angle to point between buildings when the Sun was relatively high in the sky.

Another cool feature is the ability to see what the Sun’s track will be at different times of the year.

If you are trying to maximise building an extension, conservatory, Summer house or pergola this would be especially useful as you are trying to maximise comfort and usability all year round.

Settings allow you to turn some display elements on and off in the two views.
Solstices are obvious and as described above, Night Path is something of a mystery in terms of usefulness but seems most likely to be a “because we can” feature.  Should you wish to, you can send images to other people by email or to your photo roll (though I used the iPhone’s in built screen shot feature for this).

In summary this is a beautifully designed and genuinely useful application.  It’s well designed, didn’t crash at any point and is extremely easy to use.  Most important of all it is an AR application which does something we could not easily do another way.  So many other apps reproduce functions a SatNav can do just as easily – this adds data to your surroundings revealing previously hidden information.

© 2010 Chas Newport – All rights Reserved

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