Chemical Wedding

What is that mountain you're driving past? Just point your iPhone at it and you can read its Wikipedia entry. Science fiction? Not anymore. Two new apps for viewing Wikipedia entries about physical locations you look at through your iPhone camera are now available in the iTunes store. Wikitude and Cyclopedia are the names of the apps and both require the new iPhone 3GS. That's because the 3GS is the first iPhone with an internal compass - Augmented Reality (AR) apps use your phone's GPS to know where you are and the compass to know which direction you're looking at. Then these two apps can tell you what you're looking at that's written up in Wikipedia. Here's how the two different apps compare. Cyclopedia (iTunes link) is the newest app from a dev shop called Chemical Wedding. It scores high on visual interface but is relatively simple, displaying only Wikipedia content. It got a write-up on Gizmodo yesterday, was read about by more than 10,000 people, but saw very little discussion. There is no Android version of this app and we haven't been able to test it yet, but it costs $2 in the iPhone app store. The app has been out since July but the company hasn't been on the radar of any of the AR-watchers we know. GamesAlfresco, the leading AR news blog we've found, has never mentioned this app once. Presumably the company would have sold a lot more software if it had bothered to tell people it existed. When tens of thousands of people went crazy in August checking out the Yelp iPhone app, believing it was the first AR implementation live in the iTunes store, no one from Chemical Wedding bothered to speak up about having an iPhone AR app for sale. There's not even a link to the app in iTunes on the company's own website. Update: Chemical Wedding contacted us and said that the app really only went live a few days go after all and that the lack of a link was an oversight. We apologize if we were rude in pointing it out. :) Wikitude is a well-developed AR app already available on Android phones for months. It just launched on the iPhone today. The company launched the app without telling anyone, but word got passed around this afternoon on Twitter. Wikitude has a less shiny interface than Cyclopedia but has a Read More