Local Buddy goes magnetic

This week Local Buddy moved to another level since we finally got a hold of a Nokia N97 which has a magnetometer built inside. This really increased the wow-factor of our demo and the whole team went bananas.

At the beginning of this project we chose Nokia 5800 as the target device of our demo because it had a nice big touch screen. Since the 5800 lacks compass we've been forced to calculate the movement of the user from gps data. And this means that the user has to walk so that things update on the screen. This isn't the ideal situation since everything will happend with a delay.

By using the magnetometer built inside a N97 we can update the screen in real-time and the user will experience an immediate response. Now the user can turn without walking and things on the screen will follow. We've also found out that the N97 is a way faster machine than the 5800. This is helpfull since we use lots of heavy graphics in our demo. We've already had to cut down some of the graphics so that our demo won't turn into a slide show.

The artistic side of our team is still busy writing the concept documentation and preparing themselves for the final pitching. The technical side will now handle with all the remaining tweaks and fixes so that we have something nice to show at the and of this month.