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Mike Bantick15 Mar 2018
NEWS

Pinpoint your parked car with PinDrive

Ever staggered around in a daze looking for your vehicle in a dark, wet carpark? This augmented reality app can help

There are a number of smart-device apps on the market that can help you find your way back to your parked car in a massive carpark complex.

Some apps will also navigate you home, to your nearest Indian restaurant or any other desirable location on the face of this earth.

However, PinDrive adds to the experience by integrating AR, or augmented reality.

For those new to the term AR it is different from the headsets of virtual reality, or VR, in that the idea is to digitally overlay data or imagery over the real world – what you see through a smartphone camera lens and then on the screen.

Some basic AR examples include a vehicle's head-up display, the Pokémon Go smartphone game, or even how Snapchat face filters work.

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In the case of PinDrive, the process is simple: find the carpark, park the vehicle, drop a virtual pin in the app next to your car by locating it on screen, then go shop. Or if you're at the airport carpark, go fly!

Upon return, simply hold up your phone (hopefully you are not too laden with bags) and using the 2D positional map in combination with an AR red flashing arrow superimposed on the camera screen, you can easily locate your car in a chockers carpark.

Being able to directly visualise the parking location through the phone’s camera combined with PinDrive graphics leads to a quick find.

It's very effective and if you've ever had that sense of dread when trying to find your ‘lost’ car, you’ll wonder how you ever coped without it.

There are couple of issues, however. The main one is the necessity to level-set the app before each use. It can take a few minutes for the app to orientate itself, as it works out where the ground is in the camera shot before enabling the overlay to allow the pin drop.

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One of the less obvious problems with this is the uncomfortable way you might feel standing in a public carpark waving your phone around as if you are filming the surrounding area. Depending on where you are, this can attract some unwanted disapproving glances.

The second issue is simply the accuracy. Multilevel or underground carparks can be an issue with either simply getting an accurate GPS lock -- or indeed a lock at all – which is the bane of all of these kinds of applications.

But if you’re prepared for that and want to try out PinDrive, you can download it from here.

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Written byMike Bantick
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