Wikitude: Augmented Reality for Everyday Use

Posted by AppBite Team

Wikitude iPhone App Review.

Imagine the iPhone live camera view overlaid with Wikipedia content. You're looking down the street and you can't recgnize your surroundings, but that museum has to be close here somewhere. Come to think of it, where is somewhere? Well, no more! Simply pull out your iPhone start up Wikitude and start looking at the world through your iPhone's camera.

Wikitude will overlay the view on your screen with Wikipedia content, providing you with just about every bit of info you'll be needing to get around and see what's worth seeing. What you will see is an annotated landscape, location names, landmark descriptions and interesting bits and pieces of information.

You can easily search for your location by address and overlaying info on the real-time camera view of the iPhone. Filtering through the wealth of information is also easy as pie and pretty intuitive, sorting by specific channels and categories. A radar-overlay in the corner of the device will display your current direction and your points of interest within your specified radius. And if you're bothered by all the moving POIs, then freeze the feature and continue viewing a not-so-augmented reality (eh, where's the fun in that?). Once you've found your destinated POI, access its detailed description and even an entire article through a hyperlink within.

So far it's an interesting idea, with great implementation, but what really makes me kick my heels three times and notice "Hey, I'm already in Kansas" is the content of the annotations. We're not looking at the world through the developers' eyes. It's other users like yourself who wholeheartedly dedicated time of their own trip to provide us with reviews of restaurants and cafes, funny back stories from theaters or sneak previews from inside museums. Say what you will about Wikipedia and its freedom for all to add information, for tourists and what Wikitude is intended for, it works great, providing you with quality content, Qype reviews and other user-generated content from Wikitude.me.

Just to talk some numbers, we're looking at over 400,000 world-wide points of interests, including cafes, museus, castles and other landmarks, and even archaeological sites and battle fields. This makes Wikitude live up to its motto: a World Browser. Might I dare call it the World Browser?

Travel addicts and tourists unite! Wikitude puts you right in the middle of your surroundings, in real time! The true world, through your iPhone's camera, annotated with descriptions and stories, making it the perfect companion.

With over 400,000 points of interest out there, what's your next destination?

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