ARound: You know, for Nokia users

ARound: You know, for Nokia users

[A short apology. A few days ago, in a bout of paranoia, I wrote a short post suspecting that Sequence Point's ARound may be some kind of malware. I jumped to conclusions due to some intriguing aspects in Sequence Point's site. I should have contacted the developers before posting, but regretfully I did not. After David Caabeiro of Sequence Point contacted me, I quickly pulled the post, understanding my mistake. Here's setting the record straight]

Got a Nokia N97 phone and envy all those cool guys with their slick iPhones or Android phones with their cool augmented reality applications? Yearn for the days when Nokia was a leader in mobile AR? Spanish company Sequence Point Software might have the solution for your desires.
Called ARound, this is the Symbian equivalent of Wikitude and Layar. Using GPS and compass readings (though future versions may include object recognition), ARound overlays the video input with points of interest gathered from 3rd party data sources, and provides details on close by landmarks.



Designed to be pluggable, ARound may interest developers as well. David Caabeiro of Sequence Point writes:

Our idea is allowing 3rd party developers to add value at different
levels of the application in a simple way: We realize Symbian is not
the easiest platform to play around so this hopefully makes things
easier for developers interested to include Symbian in their
offerings. The first plugins to be made available for developers will
be the so called "data sources", which will allow them to integrate
any content (from mashups, etc) into the application. Later some other
plugin details will be made available, allowing further customization
and integration into existing applications. For example, one of the
first goals is adding OpenGL support for those interested in doing
more advanced rendering.

Best of all, a beta version can be downloaded freely, so if you are a N97 owner, go check it out, and share your impression in the comment section.