Wikitude – Bringing Augmented Reality to Main Stream

Augmented Reality is the new IN thing for mobiles , be it Google using it to find places in Nexus One /  Android or Nokia using it with Point and Find to find product details .   However till now the technology was limited to a few phones but with Wikitude 4.0 from Mobilizy -  based in Salzburg Austria for the first time , non touch symbian phones got access to this technology - 

for now the software is available through OVI Store for free on

• Nokia E72
• Nokia N86 8MP
• Nokia 6788
• Nokia E52
• Nokia 5730 XpressMusic
• Nokia 6710 Navigator
• Nokia E55
• Nokia 6720 classic
• Nokia 6210 Navigator
• Samsung I8910 HD (will be supported by mid April)

What Wikitude does is that it creates different ‘Worlds’ for the users to access Augmented Reality Data from , these data points /  World sources include

• Flickr
• Youtube
• Panoramio
• Google Local
• Yahoo UpComing!
• Wikipedia
• Wikitude.me
• WindFinder
• Wildlife Parks in Asia
• Qype
• World Heritage List

When the application starts , by default , Flickr , Panoramio , Youtube and Google Local are already selected and works well for initial usage . 

The drawback of adding more sites is that with the default selection , Wikitude only shows available information within a Kilometer ( I use Metric Settings ) , the more sources I added , the larger area it covered ( for me it was 800 plus Kms ) and given out all the redundant information .

Once the sources are selected for your world , and Cam View is on the software will ask you to move the phone around for the built-in Digital Compass in phone to be calibrated .  It takes about 30 sec for the compass to calibrate and than the fun part begins ,  Start moving the phone around and it will show the places and marked data from that direction . 

Like I started it in my car ( please don’t use it and drive as it’s very very distracting )  while it was on the move , my son can see what’s around our location , after about a km of movement , it asks to update data to reload your world . The data you get depends on you location determined through GPS and Cell Tower Location and Digital Compass determined the direction and POI and snaps taken in that direction which even when pointed to sky.

If you don’t want to use the CamView , a list can show all the nearby places and the list of places /  pictures can be limited to 30  ,  40 or 50 places

Overall we loved the software providing us local information even in Karachi  -  Pakistan , however the information is limited to the sources and data available with them .  If Wikitude can offer an upload service or addition of new POI’s  on their own servers that will be a welcome feature . 

One problem which we faced during our usage is awkward placement of Exit button .  The Right Softkey is used for exiting the software in all the options and screens , as a user of S60v3 , usually the same softkey is associated with back key so our advice to Mobilizy is to use the middle key as exit and use the right key as back.

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Tagged as: iPHONE, Karachi, Layar, Nokia, Symbian