Weekly Linkfest

Weekly Linkfest

Flying drones, electronic musician and virtual girlfriends, all in this week's linkfest:

• 170 years after introducing the first postage stamp, Britain now introduces the first augmented stamp (though it requires German technology from Metaio)
• If you are thinking about taking your AR girlfriend to a real hotel room, consider going to therapy first (unless, of course, you live in Japan).
• BabelFisk is designer Mads Hindhede's vision of speech-to-text glasses.
  
• Ever seen one of Aphex Twin's videos where all the characters have the same grinning face? Now his live audience gets the same treatment.
• Virtual public art comes to Philadelphia (via @TalkingDogAR)
• I'm still mad at the Parrot AR.Drone folks for not giving me a model to play with. For some reason they decided to give one to the a blogger at touchArcade.com which posted a review.
• Apparently Layar are big enough to have a fan site http://www.layarnews.com/

For this week's video we've got yet another futuristic vision, this time by German designer Björn Matthes. In his diploma project, Araproject, Matthes adds an energetic urban twist to augmented reality:

Araproject - Diploma Project 2008 from bmatthes on Vimeo.

Have a beautiful week, happy Eid-ul-Fitr and Rosh Hashanah.

Weekly Linkfest

Weekly Linkfest

This week was dominated by the Parrot's ARDrone, which is just about the coolest toy I've seen in a while, made even cooler by augmented reality from our friends at int13. Other AR news articles making the rounds this week:

• Techcrunch (1) discovers the VR versus AR Google trends graph. I think just about every other AR blog featured it at some moment.
• The Guardian had an interesting article (featuring this blog) "Seven things you need to know about augmented reality" followed by a piece about AR and the future of journalism.
• Laboratory 4 had a nice roundup on the current state of AR "The reality of augmented reality" that got a follow up by Blair MacIntyre.
• Techcrunch (2) covered yet another AR browser named Nomao.
• And yet another brand of sugary cereals use AR to augmented its boxes.

Our weekly video comes from Techcrunch (3), and I'm quite sure most of you will find it non-AR. Yet, since it really makes you see things differently, exposing hidden information not available to most of us in any other way, I tend to call it AR. It's called SnapTax, and it helps you fill up your taxes by taking a picture of your tax forms (if you are a US citizen).



Have a great week!