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Update: TwittARound is available in Apple’s App Store!

This is a video of the first beta version of TwittARound – an augmented reality Twitter viewer on the iPhone 3GS. It shows live tweets around your location on the horizon. Because of video see-through effect you see where the tweet comes from and how far it is away.

The whole application is developed in Webkit (UIWebView / Safari Mobile). A native Cocoa wrapper delegates location, compass and accelerometer to Javascript in the UIWebView. The 3D scene is based on Safari Mobiles brilliant 3D CSS transforms. The Ajax part is done with jQuery. After writing some native iPhone apps this Webkit approach seems to be ideal for rapid development of applications independent of the iPhone UI.

Let’s see what Apple decides about the (semi SDK conform) video background. I already joined the AR on iPhone petition.

Next i’ll use this approach for my projects at the Fraunhofer IGD:
SnapshotAR – Augmented Reality Tourism
iTACITUS – Mobile Tourism
SurveillanceShaker – CCTV cameras on the iPhone

iTACITUS is finished. After 32 month the EU funded project came to an end. The final review took place at Reggia Venaria Reale in Italy.

Fraunhofer IGD presented the final version of our augmented reality application on UMPCs (live markerless tracking) and iPhone (Snapshot AR). The application shows context aware overlays of the architecture and interior of the palace. We only used available historic media linke drawings and paintings. This enables affordable augented reality for cultural heritage compared to expensive 3D reconstructions. For a seamless integration of the overlays we invented Reality Filtering (VAST 2008) which renders the environment in the style of the overlay (black and white drawing, painting).

My paper “Cultural Heritage Layers” about iTACITUS was accepted at VSMM 2009 in Vienna.