We covered English Hedgerow, an interesting augmented reality app for the iPhone, earlier this month, and we've just found out that the engine behind it is being made available to iOS developers. Obvious Engine, developed by Harmonypark "cultural construction company," uses an object’s natural features (including curved surface recognition) to figure out where to place animations, meaning that unlike competing solutions like Layar's Layar Vision, app developers won’t need to use any special markers or glyphs to use it. The developers are claiming 30fps tracking across a broad variety of lighting conditions and the software also features Open GL and Unity 3D for iOS integration.

To demonstrate the capabilities of Obvious Engine, the developers put together a quick demo video including a magical Dr. Pepper can morphing in real time, and some rather rambunctious elves cleanly tracking its movement around a featureless white table. We've seen a lot of interesting demos of augmented reality applications, such as Qualcomm's Vuforia, but nothing's really captured the public's imagination so far — hopefully things like Obvious Engine will help push AR into the mainstream. Developers interested in evaluating the SDK should contact its developers at the source link below.