Frown! You Are Augmenting Reality!

Frown! You Are Augmenting Reality!

One of the hurdles in the future of augmented vision is avoiding sensory overload. In Tish Shute's latest interview, Will Wright notes (and he is far from being the first one to allude to this problem):

our senses are set up to know how to filter out 99% of what is coming into them. That is why they work, and that is what is beneficial. I think that is why AR needs to focus on… You look at what I can find out on Google or whatever, the amount of information is just astronomical. The hard part, the intelligent part, is how do you figure out that one tenth of 1% that I actually care about at this given second?

Researchers from Tokyo's Meiji University, haven't quite figured out how to build that filter but they do have a neat way to avoid overloading your senses. In the F.A.R.vision system project, the level of augmentation is determined by your eyebrows. Bend them inward (that is, frown) to make virtual objects more visible.





You may look silly, but that explains why terminators always had an angry face when hunting down Sarah Connor. More information can be found here, in Japanese.

mARtha stewARt

mARtha stewARt

In December I predicted that Oprah will have an AR item on her show during 2010. My prediction is getting one step closer to becoming (augmented) reality today, as Martha Stewart has some sweepstake that involves FLARToolkit



You can try it yourself here, I didn't bother going through the questionnaire to see exactly what it's all about.

Weekly Linkfest

Weekly Linkfest

It's Sunday, and it's time for another weekly linkfest:

• Tish Shute has a short interview with Sims creator (though I'll always remember him for Simcity) Will Wright. Highlights:
  
  • "our senses are set up to know how to filter out 99% of what is coming into them. That is why they work, and that is what is beneficial. I think that is why AR needs to focus on"
  • "definitely one of our strong interests is AR."
• And there's a short video interview with Christine Perey.
• Mydeco.com and Dassault Systems launched a new iPhone app to let you try out virtual furniture in your home (see my AR in 2010 - a look indoors post for similar applications).
• Now that you have found the right furniture, you can look for the right partner, using AR, of course.
  
• Gizmodo dug out a nostalgic "mobile" AR implementation.
• Doritos Brazil has another AR campaign, but this time it features the largest marker ever.
  
• Infiniti uses old AR tricks to sell its G model.

The weekly video is not exactly a demo of an augmented reality system, but it relates well to other projected interfaces we have featured previously. It's made by Microvision, and it's pretty cool (as long as you don't have any furniture, rugs or ceiling lamps in your room) [via ecademy.com]:



Have a nice week!

ARWire - Your AR News on the Move

ARWire - Your AR News on the Move

Normally, I'll wait with this kind of news till the weekly linkfest. But, hey, then I'll miss on this scoop (and I'm really hoping this will get me a Pulitzer!). Zugara, makers of the Fashionista application and ZugSTAR, have just released an iPhone application aimed at providing you with the latest augmented reality news.

Named ARWire, this app gives you access to major augmented reality blogs and AR related twitter users (yes, I'm there :)), as well as to zugara's AR group over at Facebook.



They offer an ad supported free version, and a premium version that I can't quite locate on the appstore. Now, where are my royalties?

Kooaba Now Offers Image Recognition API

Kooaba Now Offers Image Recognition API

The Swiss Kooaba just keeps on innovating. In January Kooaba was behind the first daily newspaper that was fully augmented. Now it is the first (as far as I can tell) that offers a public, free (though limited) to their image recognition capabilities.

Using the api, one can send up to 50 daily image queries to Kooaba's servers that cover "close to ten million" movie poster, books and cd covers. They were even nice enough to provide sample code in several programming languages to get you started writing your own application. So basically, you can make your own SnapTell (or a simple Google Goggles clone).

You can find more details about it over at Kooaba's blog. It's an interesting move, but I fear that in the long run it won't suffice to fend off Google. Google has the largest image database, and I would like to see Kooaba open up their "image uploading api" (the one that lets you enter new images to the database) in order to compete with them.

ARGO - Learn Go with Augmented Reality

ARGO - Learn Go with Augmented Reality

Go. A game with such simple rules, that is surprisingly hard to master. It's the last bastion of humanity against the rising power of game playing artificial intelligence. And now, there's a cool projected AR board that will help you hone your skills in the game.
Presented by a group of researchers from Japan and Finland, ARGO uses a projector to show game situations, concepts and problems on top of a regular Go board.

As shown in these modes, the advantage of our approach is to allow players to get information through the original interaction offered by the Go board and the stones. By superimposing information onto the board, players can concentrate on the match at hand or self-training without fragmenting their attention towards an instructional book and etc. This is important to make it possible for the players to allocate enough cognitive resources for recognizing the situations in the game. Using original game items as the basis preserves Ma and traditional look-and-feel, such as distance between players, touch of a wooden board and sound of stones.

I really like how they used the stones to control the menus. Nice touch, and a cool project as a whole.

More information here.

Weekly Linkfest

Weekly Linkfest

As you might have noticed, I've been on hiatus from blogging for the last couple of weeks, but hopefully I'll have more time on my hands from now on. I haven't really kept track of what's happening in the AR Sphere in the last week, so sorry if this linkfest seems a bit anemic (and sorry if you sent me a link by email and I forgot to publish it)

• Flash has FLARToolkit. Silverlight developers, please welcome the SLARToolkit.
  
• MIT's Technology Review on TAT's Recognizr.
• Which leads nicely to this demo of Comverse's mobile face recognition application. It's not really AR (though it was celebrated as such), but I guess it can be useful in conferences.
  
• Augmented tombstones. I actually think this will become common in 80 years or so when the internet generation will get disconnected for a final last time.
• Another projected map concept by designaffairs studio (via toxel.com).
• Total Immersion and your fingers power a halfpipe skiing game.
• And finally, Glow is an iPhone app that will let you see how your friends are feeling, which could go very nicely with TAT's recognizer but makes do with a browser like augmentation.

This week's video is waiting for me to blog about for more than a week. But Toby beat me to it (damn hiatus!). It's called Immersive Rail Shooter and it's the work of one David Arenou. And it's real. If you want to read more about it (and that's a sure thing after watching the video), you can find more details on Augmented.org.

DIPLOMA : Imersive Rail Shooter from David Arenou on Vimeo.

Have a great week!