One of an ever-growing list of well known consumer facing travel giants to embrace AR, Lonely Planet has produced 25 of what it calls Compass Guides. Like the majority of AR apps in the same field, it?s a case of holding up your mobile phone in front of you and receiving annotations on your screen on top of the visual coming though the camera lens from the real world. To narrow down the information that?s pulled up, you can select from categories such as bars, restaurants, hotels, etc and you?ll see dots on your screen to let you know which direction each is relative to your position as well as how far away they are. The software relies on knowing the user?s position rather than recognising the scenary which would be far more complicated. So, as long as you can receive a GPS signal and have a compass, gryroscope and accelerometer in your device, then the app will know which way you?re facing, the orientation at which you?re holding your phone and where all the POIs are relative to your location. It?s a similar story as on most of the leading AR tourism and travel apps, be it mTrip, Nearest Tube or more general ones such as Layar and Wikitude. The information they supply is slightly different and the content and services beyond go to varying depths but their AR MO is much the same. The trouble is that, to be critical, they?re not supplying an awful lot of possibilities that weren?t already there without AR. In fact, plenty of users end up ignoring the AR elements of these applications and sticking to the top down map views provided or tie-ins with services like Google Maps for Navigation which can supply turn-by-turn directions instead of having to hold your phone out in front of you at all times.
