Now Alcatel-Lucent Augments Movie Posters

Now Alcatel-Lucent Augments Movie Posters

Not two days have passed since Nokia has released (a beta version of) their augmented reality application "Point and Find", and Alcatel-Lucent has a come-back. "Point and Find" enables the user to scan movie posters in order to get reviews and local-screening times, and requires only the installation of a single application. Alcatel-Lucent's solution doesn't even need an installation, and looks great:



I've finally dug-up some information about how Alcatel-Lucent "Enhanced Reality" solutions (which we previously discussed here and here) work - the secret is video calls. When a user "scans" an image (in the above case, a movie-poster) she actually video-calls Alcatel-Lucent and transmits her camera input to its servers. Alcatel-Lucent's servers try to match the incoming image to known "augmented" images, and sends back information, a ringtone, or in the case above a video stream back to the user.
Obviously, this technique requires a very fast network connection (especially for a "textured effect" as seen in the embedded clip), and may be difficult to scale. However, at least in lab conditions, it looks wonderful.

Alcatel-Lucent Augments your Museum Visit

Alcatel-Lucent Augments your Museum Visit

As I predicted here, Alcatel-Lucent just posted another AR concept video to Youtbue. The video shows how a visit to the Centre Pompidou would like using an augmented reality device. Nothing really revolutionary is shown, and the interface looks clunky, but I do like the transformation of Picasso's Guernica to three-dimensions.



This is yet another video attributed to Stephane Dufosse, who, according to his Linkedin profile is a business development manager at Alcatel-Lucent, responsible for "business development of video applications" including augmented reality.

Alcatel-Lucent's Augmented Reality Efforts

Alcatel-Lucent's Augmented Reality Efforts

Something is brewing up in Alcatel-Lucent. The company that tried last year to bring second-life avatars into the real world (video here), but failed to impress the crowds, and had some cooperation with Total-Immersion (video here), is now pushing onwards in multiple AR frontiers. First, there's Alcatel-Lucent Touchtag initiative (until last month it was known as Tikitag). Touchtags are cheap ($1 per tag at Amazon), programmable RFID tags that Alcatel-Lucent hopes will help create the internet of things (here's a commercial).
Moving on to visual markers based AR, Alcatel-Lucent presented their "Enhanced Reality" application for Symbian cellphones at Barcelona's GSM Mobile World Congress last month -



And then, there's this video Alcatel-Lucent released a few days ago, presenting their vision for the (near) future



I have tried contacting Stéphane Dufossé (the Alcatel-Lucent manager who posted the last video) for comments, but failed to get any reply. However, it's clear that the behemoth company is interested in AR and invests resources in this field. After relaunching Tikitags as Touchtags and posting those videos to Youtube, I'm expecting to see more of them in the coming months, making their AR strategy clear.