Magic Wand is freeware application for Nokia S60 which makes exploring a foreign city easier using your mobile phone’s GPS system and digital compass (magnetometer) without having access to a tourist guide book. It allows a the user to identify a landmark just by pointing the phone in the direction of a tourist sight or POI. With a keystroke, the name of the landmark displayed.

To get this information, the position of the user is determined through GPS. To detect the direction in which the mobile phone is pointing, the application uses an internal digital compass - magnetometer. Combining these two mechanisms leads to very accurate results. Applications that only use GPS provide information about every relevant point which is close to the user. There is no possibility to consider in which direction the user is looking.

The information about the user’s position and the pointing direction is sent to a server via a mobile internet connection. The server side application calculates the area in which the sight is located, considering the direction information. Then it searches for so-called POIs (Points of Interest) in several databases. The results of this search are sent back to the user’s mobile phone and are shown on the display. If there is more than one POI in the area, the results are sorted by distance. In the current version of the Magic Wand software, the name and the category of a POI are displayed. The user is able to filter the results by category and to choose which information about the POI should be shown.

The software is a nice proof of concept but currently there is no comprehensive POI database that can be used with Magic Wand. However, you can create your own POI database and upload it to a server. It will be interesting to see how POI files that can be downloaded from the internet (e.g here) be integrated into the server application.