Public Places app for iPhone and iPad

No matter how prepared you are, there are times when you need immediate help in locating an essential public service.

If you are from out-of-town and need to locate the nearest hospital or require the phone number for the airport or police station, you want that information fast. There are any number of situations where you could use assistance in finding a service — information supplying you with distance, address, phone number, route and even an augmented glyph pointing you toward the facility.

Public Places locates, maps and augments public service sites. It displays found services in a 10-mile (16-kilometer) radius of your location, or location of your choosing.

Public Places brings augmented reality to search and mapping, offering a more direct and intuitive search method. When applied to a map, augmented reality enhances a person’s spatial ability by supplying 3D information to help in the interpretation of a 2D surface.

The data sets in Public Places are part of the federal government’s Homeland Infrastructure Foundation-Level Data (HIFLD), a U.S. Department of Homeland Security program supporting open public national geospatial information, and U.S. Department of Energy’s alternative fuels data.

Based on Apple guidelines, these are the iOS devices required for augmented reality apps, like Public Places:

iPhone 6s and 6s Plus
iPhone 7 and 7 Plus
iPhone SE
iPhone 8 and 8 Plus
iPhone X
iPad Pro (the 10.5-inch model, 12.9-inch model, and the older 9.7-inch model)
iPad (2017)