Weekly Linkfest

Weekly Linkfest

This passing week's trending augmented reality topics were AcrossAir's Tube Locator (which is two weeks old) and James Alliban's augmented business card (which is over a month old, can't see why it became so popular suddenly). Let's hope next week will bring some fresh AR news. As a matter of fact, tomorrow I'll cover an even cooler augmented business card concept. In the meanwhile, here's this week's linkfest:

• Another week, another TalkBlogRadio interview with an AR alumni, this time it's Maarten Lens-FitzGerald of SPRXMobile speaking with Tracy Swedlow about future directions for Layar and the industry as a whole.
• Even better than the real thing: the Guardian had a good report on the current state of augmented reality.
• On the other hand, Wired mocks the current plethora of augmented reality apps with its own proposal for an an AR hobo app - "Augmented Reality Hobo Signs? There’s an App for That".
  
• The Cartoon Network is using an AR game to promote their IncrediKids show (via Revolution Magazine).
• Not only AR was used to promote the last Star Trek movie, the DVD version will have its own (?) AR experience.
  
• Techcrunch: Canon uses AR to enhance product design process. Interesting video that also shows how that dinosaur we mentioned on last week's linkfest works (answer: with a lot of markers).
• Augmented reality is cool! But where's the ROI?

Weekly quote:

However, I am nervous about the potential AR hype bubble. I'm pushing
"real AR" (which right now means tabletop) and the importance of tight
registration whenever I talk to the press or companies, because I want
as many people to realize that whether these apps succeed or fail
should not really be used as a metric of the potential success or
failure of AR.

Blair MacIntyre from an interesting discussion on the AR Forum whether the recent set of GPS based applications are AR or not (a point I've briefly touched here. I much prefer those pseudo AR application over the novelty AR applications).

This week's video comes to us from Dutch design company Strafwerk. They described this video as "welcome to the future", but I think it's actually worse than Zugara's clothes shopping application (which wasn't that great on itself):