Weekly Linkfest

Weekly Linkfest

And yet another week ends, full with exciting AR news. Some news items were put aside in order to make place to more urgent reports. Luckily, the weekly linkfest is here to mend things up.

• Short piece in the NY Times, "Kicking Reality Up a Notch".
  
• Noora Guldemond of Metaio gave an interview to TacticalTransparency at blogtalkradio. Since she mentions Games Alfresco but fails to mention Augmented Times, from now on I will only cover Total Immersion (till the end of this post).
• Speaking of Total Immersion
  
  • French McDonald's Happy Meal AR experience.
  • The Phonehouse (French mobile phones retailer) AR experience.
  • New Zealand's national rugby team players, the All Blacks, pop out to life from trading cards (similar to Topps' baseball AR cards). This one got some harsh reviews.
    
• Canon launches augmented reality dinosaur experience in Japan: "Visitors will be allowed to don a pair of virtual reality glasses that will display nearly life-sized three-dimensional images of various dinosaurs right there on the museum floor"
• Apple files for an AR patent, and so is Nokia.
  
• Coraline's 3d garden is an augmented reality application celebrating the DVD release of Coraline. Here's some UGO guys playing with it. It was created by some German company that may or may not be related to the first bullet.
  
• Lockheed Martin wins DARPA's AR specs contract.
  
• Weekly novelty AR: an augmented poster for the new Gamer action film.

This week's video is of a little application you might have heard about, called tweet TwittAround.
It enables you to see tweets overlaid on top of the video input coming from your iPhone 3GS. Tweets are rendered according to the location they are coming from. Interestingly, this project comes from the same guy, Michael Zoellner, that is behind some other cool AR applications.



Have a nice week!