We all know the scene; you’re meeting friends outside a busy train station, or in a bar, but you can’t find them for the life of you. You’re trading texts, walking from A to B, standing on benches for a better view, but they’re nowhere to be found. Neon wants to eliminate this frustrating process.
Using Apple’s ARKit, Neon aims to deliver a social AR messaging service in which users can view location-based messages and markers. That means that, when two friends are trying to meet up, one can display their location with a virtual arrow pointing down into the real world and then the other user can look through their iPhone to locate it and head in that direction. In the video below you can see it being used to find friends at a festival, for example.
Beyond that, Neon can be used for AR sign posting too. In the below video, someone advertises a house party at their location later that night, which others could stumble upon and join in with (though that doesn’t exactly sound like the safest example but we’ll go with it for now).
If you’re interested in Neon than you can currently sign-up to be notified of its launch, though the closed beta sign-up period is now closed. Presumably the app could also come to Android given the recent announcement of ARCore.
