Use Augmented Reality to find your car

by Mel Martin (RSS feed) on Nov 3rd 2009 at 6:00AM

I have to admit, when I park in a big lot, I often forget where old Betsy is. There have been more than a few iPhone apps to help you find your car, but Car Finder [iTunes link] uses augmented reality to get you pointed in the right direction.

Here's how it works: you get out of your car and mark your position, making sure you have a good GPS fix. If you don't have one, you'll be told that and see the accuracy of your fix in plus or minus meters.

You can give your location a name, and if your parking space is numbered, you can add that in. I guess that is helpful if you are parking where there is no GPS signal, but then this app won't be of much help.

You're then free to go your merry way, until it's time to find your car again. When you bring up the app, your iPhone camera is activated, and a red arrow points to your car. Swing the camera around until an icon for your car appears and start walking. You'll get a constant read-out of your distance.

In my tests, just after sunset, the app worked very well, although when I got right next to the car the arrow was pointing elsewhere. That's not surprising given the imperfect accuracy of GPS, but by the time I got the error I could see the car less than 25 feet away.

Car Finder is U.S. $0.99, so it's not over priced, and pretty much in line with other similar apps in terms of cost. The augmented reality is a nice touch, as it floats your car icon over the real world. You do get a legal warning from the app about using due caution, I guess so you won't step into a manhole or off a cliff while following the camera scene. What a litigious society we live in!

So, Car Finder works, isn't over priced, uses augmented reality which has a high 'buzz word quotient,' and should impress your non-iPhone using friends, if you have any.

You'll need an iPhone 3GS to make this work, because the compass and GPS do the heavy lifting.

This awesome infographic shows the internet costs and speeds around the world for the top 20 nations in the ITIF Broadband Rankings. Unsurprisingly, we don't compare too well.

Number one is, predictably, Japan, where the average broadband speed is 60mbps and they pay $0.27 per 1mbps. We, in comparison, average 4.8mbps and pay $3.33 per 1mbps, putting us at #15. Be sure to click the above image to see it in its full glory. [Zach Klein]

The videos are out, and now so's the camera: $5000 buys you a 16MP DSLR that shoots at a whopping 102,400ISO with a new 45-point autofocus system, 10fps bursts, and oh yeah—suck it D3s, incredible 1080p video.

The 1D Mark IV uses an APS-H-sized 16-megapixel sensor that's "similar in size to a Super 35mm motion picture film frame" with a 1.3x crop factor, and a normal ISO range of 100 to 12,800, with expanded going up to 102,400 ISO. The new 45-point autofocus system has 39 cross-type points and uses a new AI Servo II AF predictive focusing algorithm that's supposed to be faster, which is handy, since it shoots in 10fps bursts.

But, let's talk about video, which Canon isn't too shy of making the star of this camera: You get full manual exposure control, stereo mic input, and 1080p video at 24, 25 or 30fps; 720p and standard def at 50 or 60fps; and the samples, while obviously Canon-vetted, so far look seriously amazing.

There's a new auto-lighting optimizer that automatically adjusts contrast and brightness in-camera that sounds sorta like Nikon's Active D-Lighting. And hurray, a new white balance algorithm that's better at low color temperatures, something that Nikon's typically been better with in the past.

It's coming out in December for $5000. Man, pro DSLRs just got way more interesting again. Six-digit ISO speeds, extreme low-light performance , high-def video: It's a war.