Review: Wikitude

I wonder if Wikitude would work on the upcoming Nokia N8? The N8 apparently includes a magnetometer (compass) as well as the now-obligatory GPS, etc., though as Steve points out, with the camera, GPS, data connection, etc. all working at once, it would probably drain the battery dry in minutes :frown:

There's a Nobel Prize in store for the folk who invent a new super-battery technology...

Out of interest, I tried installing it on my Samsung i8510.
I downloaded the Wikitude 3rd edition with Qt libraries (9 MB), so everything required would be installed.
Install failed, not surprisingly.

I just don't get it honestly.
What is so different about every phone running S60 3rd, whether it's a Samsung or a Nokia?

I tried out both the S60 one on a N97 mini and the android one on HTC Legend both work well and is better than the Layar product on the android, the product opens up a world of opportunities to manufacturers if an organised way of getting 'Worlds' could be sorted. On a side point using the same product on the S60 and the Android shows the gulf in layout and information and general feel that is on the Android compared to the S60 and I'm not a complete Android fan boy as I keep trying to give the S60 another go.

Really nice. Though not as fancy as this, there is something similar already in google maps, where if you enable the wiki layer it throws up icons on your screens showing areas of interest.

Looks like Wikitude is from http://www.wikitude.org/ not http://www.wikitude.com/

Shame it needs a compass, I guess that's inevitable though.

The spurious "Actions" menu is a bug. In Qt you have to explicitly tell each widget what type of context menu it has. 99.99% of widgets have no context menu, but if you don't set this explicitly you will get an empty Actions menu.

Regarding running Qt apps on phones other than Nokia, please read this: http://labs.trolltech.com/blogs/2010/06/08/qt-officially-signed-for-sony-ericsson-phones-and-soon-samsung/. In short, the Qt libs must be signed by the manufacturers to work, and Samsung have just accepted the signing.

Is there anyway to add your own POIs - be nice if it interacted with places marked in OVI maps or displays only geo tagged pictures from your personal flickr account? Or even bigger datasets for GIS geeks? Such as parsing info from OpenStreetMap for cash machines, tube stations or recycling centres etc etc.

Steve, did you check about how wikitude compares with Nokia's Point & Find?

P&F seem to be just gone in shell as happens with many of Nokia's service offerings but i was just curious about comparison.

It seems as Wikitude have had a total overhaul since version 1.x
Unfortunately with QT required it quickly kills the c: drive of the N97.

I really like the description of "waving around like a demented octopus" to calibrate the compass. All in all Wikitude is far better than the counterpart ARound (when it comes to calibrate the compass).

Version 1.x which I tried was able to kill my N97 battery within 30-40 minutes so it's really a battery drainer in this respect.

The application should have had an option to store the points of interest after the initial / first launch using the data connection. Say for instance download points of interests within 4-5 km in distance from your position. Then next time when you launch the application you don't need to have a data connection as the POI are stored locally.

I think it's gimmicky and pointless. Far more practical is a traditional 2D map layout. Holding your phone out in front of you just makes you look like an idiotic poseur. Garbage IMO

I would like to see an article on what is being done to improve battery technology...it seems this is the key to making all these cool apps really useful.

Three words:

Symetric Multi Processing

http://blog.symbian.org/2010/06/08/symmetric-multiprocessing-technology-in-symbian/

http://developer.symbian.org/wiki/index.php/SMP_Introduction

Of course this is seperate from the batteries themselves, which are obviously improving in parallel.