Oh my, what an interesting week for augmented reality, especially in the business front:
Nokia Beta Labs revealed Live View, a revolutionary mobile augmented reality application. Well, unless you consider Wikitude, Layar, Junaio and many other "AR browsers" that came out in the last three years. Nokia was once a leader in AR research, it's a sad day to see them show off a product like that.
Microsoft licenses GeoVector's tech. Slashgear says the goal of this move is to challenge Google Goggles. Patent war against Google (like the current one against Android) can be another reason.
This week's video features a cool street art by SWEZA named QRadio. Graffiti boom-boxes around Berlin start to play music when the QR code drawn on them is scanned. Via Wooster Collective.
Oh, there's just too much to write about this week. In the mobile AR front:
Nokia's researcher Kari Pulli gave a talk last week at the SDForum about Nokia's take on mobile augmented reality (slides). In a nutshell, it should be based on image recognition and accessed using HMD. And here are some more details from the Nokia World event that took part this week.
buUuk is an AR browser-like application for Asia, Australia and the middle east. [via DMFO]
While Presselite which brought us Metro Paris has an application for Tokyo that looks much the same.
And GeoVector, one of the veteran players in the AR industry is going to release an application for Android named WorldSurfer. They accidently published a post about it in their corporate blog (dated for next week) and then deleted it. Luckily, there's Google Cache.
In the world of novelty AR advertisement:
You can check whether the new Samsung LED television fits your living room (which is actually a bit handy).
Here's a silly video of augmented reality game of hangman from a company named HD interactive. It seems they want to sell it to the public. Tom Carpenter shares his opinion about this topic.
This week's video comes from Vodafone, which had a lightly augmented version of the game of tag in the Netherlands for the launch of the HTC magic. More details can be found here.
Georgia Tech's has a new infomercial for their mixed reality design class.
Study finds that when it comes to in-car navigation, augmented reality is better than 3D egocentric view aids (such as plain old GPS devices). Who could have guessed?
Geocaching using augmented reality is such a neat idea, I'm surprised no one before Jacob at Trimagination thought about it.
Looking for an AR primer? Rusty Henderson has one covering the basics (with many videos), and Tom Carpenter has some more details.
My team has figured out how to build most of Rainbows End. Just matter of time and funding now... /evil scientist cackle/
I guess that if they really achieved that feat, funding will not be a problem.
And finally, the weekly video comes from GeoVector (which I previouslly covered here). It's a concept video from 1995 and contains some interesting ideas. It just shows that even if you think that you have a novel idea, someone has thought about it before. Jump to 4:51 for a really cool augmented frogger:
When one first thinks about augmented reality, she doesn't necessarily thinks about looking at black and white markers through a web camera. Augmented reality should augment our reality, and a natural useis having a mobile city guide; Point your AR device at a building, a monument, a shop or a restaurant, and get instant information about it. A decent implementation only requires a GPS and a digital compass (no tricky image recognition a la SREngine). Moreover, the payoffs from advertisements in this type of search ("local search"), can be as large as those from web search, so no wonder there are many players in that space. We all know about Mobilizy's Wikitude and Tonchidot's Sekai Camera, but there are so many more - GeoVector One of the veteran players in this area, based in San-Fransisco, but focused on the Japanese market, GeoVector has numerous location based applications. The video below shows a mesh of some of their ideas, which look a little bit less impressive in reality. An application not mentioned below is Navimon, a game where players point their cellphones at shops or buildings (guided by clues the game provides) in hopes of locating cute alien monsters. In a nutshell, it's the cutesy version of Ghostwire. More info is provided in the following CNN article.
GeoVector applications work on specific phone models. As far as I know, no version of those applications is present for the Android G1 or for Nokia's compass enabled devices. Last year, John Ellenby, GeoVector's CEO was interviewed, and had the following to say:
Thanks to GeoVector, users in Japan are now pointing their mobile phones at restaurants and getting reviews. Soon they will be pointing at billboards and going directly to the advertiser’s mobile site for shopping, and pointing at a movie poster to buy a ticket. Our system allows images, videos and sounds to be downloaded. Users can not just read about a point of interest, they have rich media experiences. (source)
Intelligent Spatial Technologies Portland based Intelligent Spatial Technologies (iST) is developing its iPointer application for the last couple of years. Very similar to GeoVector's concept, the iPointer lets you point at a specific location and get information about it. Unlike GeoVector, iPointer is developed for Windows mobile and Java phones, so you will not have to own a state of the art, available in Japan only, phone in order to use it.
The video above is already two years old. Two weeks ago, in CTIA Wireless 2009, Chris Frank, the founder and CEO of iST, claimedthat the iPointer is coming to North America within the next 12 months. The obvious question is what taking them so long. A suspecting mind may think that the iPointer is nothing more than a vaporware, but several reporters have already seen it in action, and apparently there is a working demo for the University of Maine. Let's hope they are taking their time to perfect it.
Enkin Many of us have heard about the Enkin project. It exploded last year on the internet but since then disappeared. Max Braun and Rafael Spring developed Enkin for last year's the Android Developer Challenge
As you can see, Enkin was quite similar to Wikitude, but while Wikitude was one of the winners in the challenge, Enkin failed to pass the first stage. A persistent rumor says that Google was so impressed with Enkin, that it bought it right away. In their last blog post, almost a year ago, Braun and Spring wrote:
We have been contacted by Google separately and they, too, are excited about our project. So at this point in time there are a number of possibilities for the project's future, which we are currently exploring. At the same time, we are working on realizing our previous and recent ideas. There is more to come!
However, as rumors go, this one seems to be wrong. At least officially, the two guys behind Enkin are not Google employees. However, they do continue to work on that project. Spring is still active in Android developers forums, and when I tried to contact them, they gave the laconic reply:
thank you for your interest. Unfortunately, we can't give out any details about the status of the project at the moment.
If you want to make sure not to miss any future announcements, please keep an eye on the blog.
Epilog The three products above are really exciting, but we are now in a waiting game. Which of the three companies will be the first to launch their product in a western market? And, when they finally do that, would they be able to compete with Wikitude's growing popularity and Sekai Camera's buzz?
We, at Augmented Times, believe that augmented reality (AR) is the next big paradigm shift. Connecting the world wide web with the physical world and the many objects, places and humans it contains, AR is both a disruptive technology and an exciting vision of the future.
This blog's goal is to document AR taking over our lives, but it needs your help. Have an augmented reality related news or story? Published an interesting paper about AR? Have something to say about this site or the AR community in genereal? Tell us about it, at rouli.net ~at~ gmail.com
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