We’ve written about more than a few augmented reality applications here in the past, some more useful than others. But like one of the earliest AR apps, Sekai Camera, one of the more practical uses of the technology is in navigation. And Fujitsu has recently released an augmented reality iPhone app for use in in-car navigation, which also looks very practical. It’s called Driview.
It will be complementary to the Fujitsu Ten car navigation system, and users will simply mount their iPhone on the dash and connect it to the system with a cable. The video feed from your iPhone camera then gets geo-specific information and icons superimposed over the video feed, showing you route information and turns.
One other neat feature is that it allows you to use the front-facing camera to get a picture of your car’s backseat (see picture above). So if the kids are misbehaving you don’t have to turn around to catch them in the act.
Fujitsu previous launched other smartphone apps for in-car use, such as TwitDrive (for Tweeting while driving – we think this might be unnecessary!), DocoCar (for finding your car), and Car News Reader (now this one sounds useful!). For now it's only available in the Japanese app store, but we hope that it becomes available in other markets later.
Check out the demonstration video in Japanese below, and screenshots after that:
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