Reportedly, there is a unique new Twitter application in development called TwittAround. It is an augmented reality Twitter viewer client meant for the iPhone 3GS.
With this application, you can see LIVE tweets from other tweeps around your location i.e. in any place near you. You can even see the amount of distance they are away from you. You can move the iPhone around and watch the miniature display pictures of the tweeps from the location in front. When you tap on the display picture, the profile of the user opens up as can be seen in this Youtube video:
It actually uses a combination of the iPhone 3GS digital compass and its accelerator-enabled GPS. This helps to determine the location of the tweets and then layers those on top of a live video feed. The final output – a Twitter experience that is fantabulous.
However, this brings in a problem. The compass that it uses is the 3GS’s built-in digital compass which helps to determine the location of the tweet. Unfortunately, this feature isn’t present in the older versions :(. Therefore, the application will run on the latest iPhone 3GS ONLY.
Well this is not done yet! There is another problem with this application. The app cannot be added to the App Store because it makes use of some low level APIs that Apple wont allow. This means that you will have to jailbreak your iPhone in order to run this application. Click here to learn how to jailbreak your iPhone 3GS.
The technical details pertaining to TwittAround being:
“The whole application is developed in Webkit (UIWebView / Safari Mobile). A native Cocoa wrapper delegates location, compass and accelerometer to Javascript in the UIWebView. The 3D scene is based on Safari Mobiles brilliant 3D CSS transforms. The Ajax part is done with jQuery. After writing some native iPhone apps this Webkit approach seems to be ideal for rapid development of applications independent of the iPhone UI”
It is an extremely interesting application to view the tweets nearby. Let’s hope that a downward compatible version of this application will be built soon!
