Weekly Linkfest

Let's try to make this week's linkfest as concise as possible:

• Tish Shute interviews Bruno Uzzan, CEO of Total Immersion for UgoTrade.
• Blair Mcintyre: "Has AR taken off? Is it finally here?", check out the quote below.
  
• Augmented reality tested on board the international space station, to help astronauts in maintenance tasks.
• Another pseudo-AR game whose goal is to catch ethereal creatures - Fairy Trails.
• Intel looks into augmented reality devices.
• Total Immersion (those from the first bullet) created a bumping-cars game for Six Flags.
• You know that AR is really hot when (French) politicians start to use it in their press conferences (powered again by Total Immersion).
  

AR Browsers:

• Presselite's application is now named Bionic Eye.
• AcrossAir's Nearest Wiki overlays reality with relevant Wikipedia articles (video).
  
• The NorwegianYellow Pages lets you find a plumber via augmented reality.
  
• Insqribe offers a mobile AR platform for sale
• And RobotVision was featured on TechCrunch.
  

Ad campaigns of the week:

• Healthy Choice
• MTS (a mobile operator in Russia) (video)
• Malwee Brazil uses Augmented Reality to sell clothes, I think (video)
  
• Michael Jackson Opus book comes with augmented reality, I have so many nasty jokes to tell, but I'll spare you (via Augmented Planet)
  

This week's quote comes from Blair's post I've mentioned above (and yes, I took it out of context, because I'm a blogger!):

Now that the time is here, now that the promised AR apps can be published in the iTunes store, will they be able to live up to their claims, or will they (and their claims) fade away? I suspect things will die down for a little while. At least, I hope things die down for a while

And this week's video comes from YDreams, and you have probably seen it before. It's called Flyar, and it's an interactive screen saver that shows you Twitter updates with birds that respond to your hand-gestures, a la EyeToy. Yeah, the video makes it clearer:

Flyar: Augmented Reality Twitter Visualization App from YDreams on Vimeo.

Have a nice week!