Weekly Linkfest

Weekly Linkfest

Pizzas, Ghosts and Robots, all making augmented reality news this week:

• Ghostwire, the award winning game for the Symbian OS, is now coming to Nintendo DSi.
• Toy maker WowWee (the guys behind the Robosapien) planned to introduce a robotic augmented reality game where you drive the robot through an augmented environment. Alas "they thought it might be too complex for the average consumer to understand and enjoy.
• The Wall Street Journal on augmented reality (subscription required): "Madison Avenue Flirts With 3-D". On the same note, here's an article from Fast Company I missed last month, "When 'Mad Men' Meets Augmented Reality".
• AdLab scans through seven augmented reality mini-sites (the usual suspects, GE's smart grid and Nissan's good decision included). Their verdict - "it's jaw-dropping only the first time you see it. After that it quickly regresses from neat to meh". Read the article for seven other discussion points.
• The inescapable, Papa Johns virtual road trip, where you can place a greasy pizza box in front of your web-cam, and drive a virtual Camaro. I had the honor of tweeting about it before the site was online.
  

Quote of the week comes from that WSJ article:

Madison Avenue has high hopes for the gimmick. "It's the new bright and shiny object that marketers want," says Tom Bedecarre, chief executive of AKQA, a San Francisco digital marketing firm that created the Postal Service campaign. AKQA is currently pitching several of its clients' campaigns that include the technology.

Which means we should expect more bad novelty augmented reality ahead.

And to start off the coming week, here's a nice clip showing projected pong game, made by two students from the IT University of Copenhagen. Here you can find out how they did it, and see some behind the scenes pictures.