Weekly Linkfest

Weekly Linkfest

Another week passed by, and I was especially lazy this week. Sorry, but apart from those augmented strippers from Monday, nothing excited me enough (or annoyed me enough) to write a post about. Which means, we have an extra long linkfest today.

However before we start, I would like to learn a thing or two about our dedicated readers. The next poll asks you to define yourself, and you may select more than one answer. Are you more the creative kind of person, or a problem solver? Please vote, and I'll post the results on next week's linkfest:




And now, for the links:

• Tish Shute's second interview with Robert Rice really makes you think, with some great quotes talking about Neogence and the AR consortium (see below), and a great comment by our regular patron DarkFlame.
• According to Gartner, AR is on its way to the peak of the inflated expectations mountain in their hype cycle model. ReadWriteWeb also takes a look at it, and they link to my strippers post.
• AcrossAir is working on an interesting augmented reality game named Virus Killer 360, but it doesn't really look like augmented reality, even under my low standards.
  
• iPhone ARKit is a new open source augmented reality tool kit for the iPhone (very new, not really useful at the moment). Not many details are known and Thomas reports on those that are.
  
• SPRXMobile envies Twittaround, joins forces with Tweetmondo to show tweets on Layar.
• CNN: "New phone apps seek to 'augment' reality" (but what a 'funny' title)
  interviews Blair MacIntyre and SPRXMobile.
• Speeking of Blair, he invites you to experiement with AR.
  
• Boing Boing Gadgets had a day dedicated to augmented reality, featuring a visit to Geisha Tokyo Entertainment, "It's the end of the non-augmented world as we know it" (the usual rundown of AR videos) and "What do pirates call augmented reality".
  
• AR Campaigns of the week:
  
• Best buy goes augmented, with BestBuyin3d.com. More on this, tomorrow (credits go to Modern Climate). (via dvice.com)
• A new site to promote Sony Pictures’ District 9 (credits go to Trigger).
• The Australian Navy lets you fire torpedos out of an augmented submarine (credits go to Visual Jazz and Boffswana)
  

The quote of the week comes from Tish Shute's interview with Robert Rice:

This is part of the problem right now though…no one seems to be thinking about the bigger picture much. All of the effort is either on making the next cool ad campaign for a car or a movie, or creating a tool to tell you where the nearest thingamajig is, but in a really cool fashion on a mobile device.

No one is talking much about filtering data, privilege systems, standards, third party tools, interoperability, and so on. There is also little conversation about where hardware is going. Right now everyone is developing software based on what hardware is available. This needs to change where hardware is being developed to take advantage of new software coming out (this happened in the PC industry a while back and growth accelerated dramatically).

And finally, the next video is of GeoBeagle, an application for Android that adds an augmented reality twist to geo-caching (which is an idea I first encountered here). Interestingly, it uses Wikitude's API, showing off some of the power of that platform.



Have a nice week!

Robert Rice at Mobile Monday Amsterdam

Robert Rice at Mobile Monday Amsterdam

This passing Monday, Amsterdam hosted a Mobile Monday event, which ended with a talk by Robert Rice.
To tell you the truth, I'm a bit disappointed that we didn't get any information about whatever super secret product is under development in Neogence. On the other hand, we got a nicely presented introduction to augmented reality and Rice's take on the subject.



Here you can find the slides, while here you can find some clarifications from Rice himself.

Weekly Linkfest

Weekly Linkfest

Here are some other AR news from around the web:

• Enter the mind of Ronald Chevalier, an experience that promotes this film.
• 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.

The quote of the week comes from Robert Rice's twitter feed:

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:

Weekly Linkfest

Weekly Linkfest

Some other news from around the web:

• Sergey Ten opened a mobile AR group at Linkedin.
• Games Alfresco: Games of the future are mostly augmented
• The World Wildlife Foundation (WWF) is going in the way of GE - Augmented earth hour
• Looking for an AR job? Neogence is looking for an OpenGL guru.
• Looking for an AR research position? The Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel Institute in Bremen, Germany is looking for a researcher on the field of augmented welding helmets.
  
• An audio recording of SXSW's "Emerging Trends of Mobile Technology" panel, previously mentioned here.

Quote of the week:

Designers may be used to the technology behind augmented reality and understand how an icon on paper can be transformed into a 3D animation you can move yourself. But we must never forget how our target audience thinks. For ‘the masses’ augmented reality feels like magic. They don’t think in technologies, but just experience the result. And when they do this, they are overwhelmed by the coolness of augmented reality.

From "The viral effect of augmented reality" at Johnny Holland Magazine.

And just to spice things up, here's a video of an augmented fossball table using Goblin XNA someone did as an homework assignement -



Have a nice week!