Nearest Tube iPhone augmented reality application

Acrossair has developed a new augmented reality for the iPhone 3GS designed to help iPhone owners find their nearest tube station in London. As you can see from the video at the end of this post, the application (which is still under review by Apple and not available on the App Store) utilizes the phone's compass and GPS localization to display the directions to the tube stations near the user. This information is displayed over the video captured with the phone's build-in camera to make consuming the information easier for the user.

Clearly, the application does not perform any image processing such as structure from motion computations. It also does not embed 3D objects into the scene as most would expect from an augmented reality application. I don't know what the exact definition of augmented reality is since it is not area of research of my own but I usually expect more than just an overlay of data over a video stream. That said, the iPhone and all other smart phones in the market are not powerful enough to perform such computationally expensive computations so the current crop of augmented reality applications are likely to be more like Acrossair's Nearest Tube.

Finally, let me remind you of an older article of ours discussing Nokia's efforts to bring this kind of functionality to smart phones more than a year ago. Interested readers can read our article With computer vision by your side you will never have to ask for directions again. The same post includes a research video from the University of British Columbia showing how with image processing, i.e., structure from motion estimation, objects can be added seamlessly into the video stream.

And so, here is the Nearest tube demonstration video.