Urbanspoon iPhone App Adds Augmented Reality

The mobile augmented reality space continues to heat up, with Wikitude and Layar on Android and the Yelp Monocle debuting AR on the iPhone. Yesterday another iPhone app got the augmented reality functionality, this time with restaurant-finding Urbanspoon’s new “Scope” feature.
The AR adds to Urbanspoon’s existing featureset, where you can browse or search for a good restaurant nearby or, with a surprisingly fun gesture, shake the phone to get a random local result. With the new “Scope” feature, you’ll see a Google Map showing your position in blue and the red pins representing restaurants nearby.
If you point the iPhone at the horizon, however, the app will detect the change via the accelerometer and switch to camera display view with an augmented reality overlay of those restaurants. They appear as bright circles with smaller size representing farther distance. Each circle contains a percentage of how many app users “liked” that particular restaurant, with more liked restaurants appearing a deeper orange and less liked restaurants fading into shades of grey.


The Scope feature only works with the iPhone 3GS, so unfortunately generations 1 and 2 iPhone users are out of luck for now. The other caveat is that the GPS positioning employed by the app can sometimes be slightly off, but you can rectify that simply by modifying your blue dot positioning on the Scope map. I love that a simple graphic can pack in so much useful information about points of interest near your location.