iPhone app adds tweets, audio to camera view

The app, TwittARound, peppers your iPhone’s camera view with the icons of Twitter users who may be tweeting nearby, and whose tweets are somehow connected to your current location.

The Twitter icons you’ll see show who is closest to you, but placing those on top of other icons.

TwittARound will work only with the new iPhone 3G S. The app needs the iPhone’s compass, along with its other sensors, to tell which way the phone’s camera is pointed - in other words, so that TwittARound can tell what exactly you are looking at.

TwittARound provides an excellent example of how you can visualize the origins of the data you see on your iPhone.

Michael Zöllner, TwittARound’s developer, plans to use the app’s underlying technology in those that he is working on at the Fraunhofer Institute for Computer Graphics Research in Darmstadt, Germany.

Zöllner, co-head of the virtual and augmented reality department at IGD, is also working on an AR app, iTacitus, which history buffs could use to retrieve data that corresponds to the sites in their camera views.

But the neatest thing about iTacitus, an EU-funded project, is that it may be the first AR app to have a 3D “acoustic AR module,’’ which delivers ambient sounds to the listener, based on his position and the orientation of his mobile camera phone.

So, while you are taking in the beauty of an immense cathedral, you would also be able to hear the Gregorian chants coming from inside. Outside, and all around you, meanwhile, you would hear the horse clops and wooden wheels of a medieval village.

With the iPhone version of iTacitus (itacitus.org), you can also take pictures, and the app will overlay images of paintings and statues that once occupied the spot in the image.

Computer security

Swipe a credit card, literally, to shop online

A USB scanner that you set up at home, it encrypts the data from your credit card before it reaches your computer, according to the manufacturer, NetSecure Technologies Ltd., of Regina, Saskatchewan. That means there is nothing left on your computer for a hacker to steal. (Of course, I’m thinking the same thing you are: “There has to be a way around this, too.’’)

SmartSwipe might also help compulsive online shoppers control their habit (I had an eBay problem once) by making each transaction more concrete. The device (www.smartswipe.ca) blocks the little fields in your Web browser with lock symbols. It requires you to actually reach into your wallet, find the plastic, and slide the card through its ATM-like slot.

SmartSwipe works with all major credit cards, but not with all sites, such as those that use Flash payment forms. And sorry, Mac users: SmartSwipe does only Windows. The company has not indicated that a Mac version is in the offing.