New Yelp Feature: Augmented Reality
Yelp, the community driven website helping people find and review local businesses, as of version 3.0, now includes an interesting easteregg: Augmented reality (AR). Augmented reality wasn’t expected for iPhone at all until at least iPhone OS 3.1 came out sometime in September. In fact, Apple was apparently actively stopping developers from releasing apps which included AR features.
Even more proof that the app store isn’t perfect, Yelp was able to bypass apple’s review panel and sneek add this feature to their app by including it via hidden easteregg which is only activated by running Yelp and shaking your iPhone (3GS only) three times. You know you’ve done it right when a message pops up informing you “The Monocle is activated. Yelp thought reality was boring so we augmented it.” At that point a button appears in the upper right hand corner that says “Monocle”, clicking this activates AR.
