Weekly Linkfest

After a short break, here's another weekly linkfest:

Just in time for Halloween, the French game company Momorprods released a new iPhone game called "Ghost Blasters", which puts you in the role of a ghost buster blaster. Writes Jerome Moreau:
I realize we've done nothing truly original so far. We have plenty of ideas for updates tough, but we tried to get a basic version out of the door in time for Halloween. This was really our first try at making an iPhone game and as you'll see in the credits there's definitely not too many of us on the team :p

In future updates, we plan to improve the monsters and weapons, etc., but more importantly add geolocation and social network-oriented multiplayer.

The game is free and available here, so why won't you give it a chance?



Have a treat of a week!

Weekly Linkfest

First, and foremost, I owe an apology to Total Immersion which I criticized for having an invitation only event (AR-Immersion). They have kindly reminded me that their event is free of charge, unlike other similar events. Anyway, you can ask for an invitation here.

Now that this is behind us, here are other things that happened in the AR-sphere:
This week's video proves that augmented reality can be annoying at times, like a virtual fly you can shake off. Created by Michele Cirulli, this was apparently a video installation at the Live Performers Meeting this year.



Have an excellent week!

Weekly Linkfest

ISMAR 2010 is just a couple of days away, and in the meantime, here's this week's linkfest:

Today's video is coming to us straight from ISMAR 2010. It's a presentation of the results achieved in the paper "Build Your World and Play In It: Interacting with Surface Particles on Complex Objects" by Brett Jones and other researchers from the University of Illinois. The paper presents a way to map virtual content on 3d physical constructions and "play" with them. For more details check out Jones' website. I think that Angry Birds would be prefect on such a platform:

Build Your World and Play In It: Interacting with Surface Particles on Complex Objects (ISMAR 2010) from Brett Jones on Vimeo.



Have a great week, and the lucky of you who get to be in ISMAR, take some videos, please!

Olympus's AR Walker - Good Reason to Move to Japan

I'm a firm believer that the first commercially available head up devices will be sold to joggers and bicyclists.

Imagine going on an augmented run, where instead of just listening to music or podcast, you do that, and play a computer game for the extra motivation. Every now and then you'll have to pick a virtual coin, or avoid some virtual danger. Think of Sonic the Hedgehog, where you are Sonic. Or you may run against a virtual competitor, which may very well be non other than yourself, as recorded on a previous run. At the very least you'll be able to constantly see you heart rate and the number of miles you've already completed.

Now meet AR Walker from Olympus. It's a simple HUD (and not available commercially), but it's a good start. Once AR takes hold among amateur sportsmen, it will have a real chance in entering our daily lives.



CrunchGear has some more details about it.

The Great Disappearing Act

If you thought that augmented reality can only place virtual object in real environments, think again. AR can also be used to 'delete' real object, making them transparent.

Case in point, Francesco I. Cosco's work presented at ISMAR09 (which reminds me that ISMAR 2010 is less than two weeks away!). In this work, Cosco and other researchers from the University of Calabria, Italy and the Rey Juan Carlos university in Spain, tried to add haptic interaction to an augmented environment. Problem is, haptic devices are visually not attractive, and aren't really a part of the scene. The solution they came up with was quite 'magical':



More details on Cosco's home page.

Cosco F. I., Garre C., Bruno F., Muzzupappa M., Otaduy M. A. "Augmented Touch without Visual Obtrusion". Proceedings of the IEEE International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality 2009.

Highlights from Metaio's insideAR

So Metaio was nice enough to upload all of insideAR talks online (wish that the organizers of ISMAR10 will follow suit). However, most of us don't have a day to spend watching all the talks, so here are some of my favorites (note that I'm a tech head, so your mileage may vary) :




Sadly, no videos of Metaio folks drinking excessive amounts of beer in the Oktoberfest, but I keep my hopes high for next year.

Weekly Linkfest

Lots of exciting news this week!

As for this week's video, we have Sky Canvas, an iPhone application with a brilliant concept behind it, from Shiodome Innovation Studio, Japan. A part of their PaPaCo Design Project, Shiodome tried to create an application that can be played together by a father and his son. With Sky Canvas, the two can form clouds in the shape of animals by tapping and blowing air to the microphone. Unfortunately, the app is not available outside of Japan, so I can't really test it, but as you surely have understood by now, I dig the concept:



Have a great week!