14 DAY TRIAL // Windows Phone 7, the latest mobile operating system that Redmond-based software giant Microsoft brought to the market only several weeks ago, can allow developers to run unauthorized code, and the first application that can take advantage of these capabilities was showcased not too long ago.
Not only does the said software solution benefit from the recent finding that Windows Phone 7 would enable devs to include native code in their applications, but it also builds on exploiting a functionality unavailable before for app building, namely native camera APIs.
Kevin Marshall from WP7 development house Clarity Consulting came up with a YouTube video in which a Silverlight application that benefits from the said native camera APIs is demonstrated.
Basically, the application's developers was able to utilize a Silverlight augmented reality framework, SLARToolkit, through which he came up with a sample augmented reality application.
The announcements comes only about a week after Australian developer Chris Walsh, discovered the fact that Windows Phone 7 could allow developers the possibility to run native code in their applications.
In all fairness, one would not be able to come up with an augmented reality software solution while using the public Windows Phone 7 SDK that Microsoft made available for app builders.
This does not mean that Microsoft might not include the necessary APIs in the SDK with future releases, but, at the moment, tapping into this kind of functionality is just not possible.
Moreover, the current development of this application benefits from a series of capabilities within the Windows Phone 7 operating system, but which are outside the controlled framework that Microsoft would impose to developers.
“After seeing Chris’s tweets it gave me some motivation to try getting the camera and compass to work. Ideally this would be accessible to everyone somewhere between now and really soon. Sometimes I think Microsoft doesn’t want developers to have fun on this platform,” Kevin Marshall notes in a recent blog post.
"Raw camera access and the compass are two of the 4-5*things you need to make some awesome phone apps like video chat, Facebook augmented reality view of places/friends, shiba inu mobile puppy cams, etc,” he continues.