[acgourley]

It's cool, but lets keep a few things in mind:

1) When navigating a 2d plane, or looking for things in a 2d plane, an overhead view is just as practical. Although you could argue this lets you see data points farther ahead of you, a good overhead view implementation could do the same thing.

2) This would be nice viewing differences in elevation. Finding your car in a parking garage for instance. However, GPS has an elevation error rate about 3 times larger than its horizontal rate. (Also most gps's don't work well in things like parking garages). This means you'll only be able to detect the elevation of something within ~30 meters on most phones.

Mostly I see this being fun, but not anymore useful than other, more traditional ways of looking at maps. It might prove helpful to people with exceptionally poor spacial thinking (if thats the term you use to describe people who can't read maps, I'm not sure).

[mlinsey]

If you're good at getting your bearings, yes. But having witnessed myself and others struggle to figure out "wait, which way is which according to this map?" for a little bit before getting our internal compass aligned with the map's orientation, it would be much simpler to literally point your camera at something and have it tell you what's in that direction. Depending on how precise the tags are, they would also be useful just to provide information about various interesting objects in the area, particularly if you can see tags that everyone puts on real-world objects.

[phaedrus]

Yes! This is exactly why the live view is so useful.

I did a land nav course in the Marine Corps; we had compasses we used to sight landmarks so we could triangular our location. To do this you held up the compass and looked through a slit. I'd call that analog navigation: The live view of Enkin is the same concept in digital form.

[krschultz]

Sailors do it that way too, its called a hockey puck compass, you site through it at a landmark and triangulate your position on a chart after you get a few bearings on a few different spots. Now most people just use GPS but the idea is the same.