Last night I was mulling over the new iPhone and 3.0OS stuff, and then Brady goes and covers most of it anyway: What the iPhone 3GS and 3.0 OS Means for Geo Devs.
Really the two elements I was most interested in were the Compass for pretty much the reasons Brady (damn him!) states … the Augmented Reality bit. Regular readers will already know I have a soft spot for AR … Where I’m actually living in augmented reality, Jefferson Airplane and what does this mean for photos and Nearly Augmented Reality – Step 5.
So when the phone knows roughly where you are and roughly which way you’re facing you can start to do some fancy/interesting, or at the very least something that overlays information based on your current location.
Throw on top of that the Camera refinements which, once again, sigh, Brady points out means it’ll have a better time reading QR Codes both close up and now slightly further away. I’ve never had any trouble myself using Optiscan from airsource on the iPhone. But it should help it pick other markings placed to help an app key into exact location.
… oh wait, third thing, the Peer-to-Peer API, useful for groking a location if you don’t know where you are, based on people nearby who do. Probably the best introduction to why this works and is good is Leonard’s talk from last year’s WhereCamp: Proximity and Relative Location: Theory and Practice.
Hopefully now it’ll be possible to prove the location aware, information/data sharing, roaming mesh-network can now be done on readily available consumer hardware.
iPhones are the new ants.
Photo by grateful420angelina
[...] Damn’it … iPhone 3GS and 3.0OS … Brady gets in first, and Ants! [...]