When the MacRumors yesterday released a screenshot of the iPhone OS 3.0 video recording screen, the site also highlighted having found information about a magnetometer (digital compass) in the device, a technology that may come to complement the accelerometer we already know and open up great possibilities on the platform .
Game researcher Blair MacIntyre, also a professor at the School of Interactive Computing at Georgia Tech, created a film that demonstrates what we will be able to see soon: a combination of real videos and computer graphics, in order to create an “Augmented Reality” application (“Augmented Reality”), see below.
(youtube) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_0bitKDKdg0 (/ youtube)
One more, published by Touch Arcade:
(youtube) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QoZRHLmUKtM (/ youtube)
The incorporation of such technology will allow the iPhone to determine not only the person's exact position, but even the direction in which it is pointing. Data would be crossed from the GPS, the accelerometer and the digital compass.
Putting this into practice, it is imagined that the iPhone can start showing information about buildings, for example, just by pointing it towards them. Another very nice similar utility would be to obtain details about stars and constellations by simply pointing the iPhone at the sky at night.
In August last year, a video of an alleged “iHologram” appeared on the web, which was quickly identified as a fake. In fact, at that time (see, it doesn't even have that much time!) It wouldn't be possible, but if the rumor of a three-axis magnetometer is confirmed, the iPhone would already be capable of something very similar.
