ANZ Bank have recently released an iPhone app for real estate analysis
I have to say, the application looks amazing, one of the best I've used. The user can search for houses on the market by location, price range, etc. Then the results can be displayed in three different ways:
1) A list (boring)
2) As points on a map (good)
3) In an augmented reality view (great)
The map view is cool, but is becoming expected within these kinds of applications. The thing really impressed me was the AR view. Augmented reality uses phone location (GPS + compass + accelerometer) to add information to the camera display. In this implementation, ANZ have presented the real-estate information to the user in a format that they can relate to (more so than a map). It is a bit of a gimmick, mainly because it heavily relies on the compass sensor at this stage, but impressive none the less.
What would be really cool, would be to see some live GPS data streaming to the display. For example, someone is waiting for their bus, so they open the AR display and can see that they have missed it by a few minutes. Or to interact with nearby friends, Twitter would become more like a phone call and less like a messaging service.
It's great stuff and am looking forward to seeing other implementations. I've already used the Layar app to overlay Wikipedia articles and other sources on the camera display. Let me know if you know of any other good ones!
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