Augmented Reality? I'm Loving It

Augmented Reality? I'm Loving It

Or used to, I'm currently in the trough of disillusionment. But never mind that, here's how McDonald's Italy chose to promote their new hamburger. Giving new meaning to Bruce Sterling claim that current AR is a bit cheesy.



Try it here.
Previously - Find Nearest McDonald's via AR and Augmented Burger King.

A break from our regular schedule

A break from our regular schedule

Once is funny,
Twice is nice,
A third time is meh, though it made me hungry.



Some weird viral ad from Burger King New Zealand, go figure.

A break from our regular schedule

A break from our regular schedule

Just to have a short laugh (or rather a smirk) here is another parody AR clip, made by Bruno Tozzini, following the footsteps of Anatoly Zenkov.

Augmented Reality Extreme from Bruno Tozzini on Vimeo.

I was actually surprised to see the final twist. Obviously this summer makes my dumber than usual.

Blink-182 Perform in a Doritos Bag

Blink-182 Perform in a Doritos Bag

Doritos had several augmented reality campaigns we previously covered (here and here). Now, they let Blink-182 fans watch a virtual concert by the band using a bag of Doritos, a Webcam, and setting their web browswers to this site.

“An online 3-D performance was something we just had to be a part of,” Hoppus said in a press release. “As big technology guys, we’re pumped that people can now experience a little bit of our summer tour through something as accessible as [a] bag of Doritos and a computer.”

It's like nothing we have seen before!

More info on Wired, via The Future Digital Life.

Weekly Linkfest

Weekly Linkfest

Pizzas, Ghosts and Robots, all making augmented reality news this week:

• Ghostwire, the award winning game for the Symbian OS, is now coming to Nintendo DSi.
• Toy maker WowWee (the guys behind the Robosapien) planned to introduce a robotic augmented reality game where you drive the robot through an augmented environment. Alas "they thought it might be too complex for the average consumer to understand and enjoy.
• The Wall Street Journal on augmented reality (subscription required): "Madison Avenue Flirts With 3-D". On the same note, here's an article from Fast Company I missed last month, "When 'Mad Men' Meets Augmented Reality".
• AdLab scans through seven augmented reality mini-sites (the usual suspects, GE's smart grid and Nissan's good decision included). Their verdict - "it's jaw-dropping only the first time you see it. After that it quickly regresses from neat to meh". Read the article for seven other discussion points.
• The inescapable, Papa Johns virtual road trip, where you can place a greasy pizza box in front of your web-cam, and drive a virtual Camaro. I had the honor of tweeting about it before the site was online.
  

Quote of the week comes from that WSJ article:

Madison Avenue has high hopes for the gimmick. "It's the new bright and shiny object that marketers want," says Tom Bedecarre, chief executive of AKQA, a San Francisco digital marketing firm that created the Postal Service campaign. AKQA is currently pitching several of its clients' campaigns that include the technology.

Which means we should expect more bad novelty augmented reality ahead.

And to start off the coming week, here's a nice clip showing projected pong game, made by two students from the IT University of Copenhagen. Here you can find out how they did it, and see some behind the scenes pictures.

Kotex Augmented Reality

Kotex Augmented Reality

Not really news, since it's three months old, but finally a demo video surfaced on Youtube. I find it strange that those are obviously a man's hands on the clip, but maybe it's just me.



It's an ad that ran on Turkish newspapers, where you could find the marker and a link to the site. Suddenly those augmented reality car campaigns don't look so bad anymore.

Stop Using AR to Sell Cars - Part Two

Stop Using AR to Sell Cars - Part Two

Nissan has a new augmented reality campaign to promote their cars. It's much better than their old campaign promoting only the Cube, but it's still meh. But don't you think that they didn't consider my plead to stop using AR to sell cars (go there to see their former use of AR, as well as many other augmented car campaigns). They actually think that's the right decision. Here, see for yourself:


No video this time, sorry. Via Twitter, on every other mention of augmented reality.

More Augmented Advertisement

More Augmented Advertisement

Our friend Diego Gopen has notified us that his augmented advertisements service, ARvertising.com, has a new demo, one that lets you play augmented dice online:



According to him it's "100% random! good for stuff for casinos online ;) because it works with physics so it's impossible to manage".
But beware Diego! There are new competitors in the AR advertisements business! Brian Selzer found that ADmmersion.com has a very similar service. No videos yet, though if you register you can try their very basic FLARToolKit demo.

Combining several proven technologies, ADmmersion™ brings advertising to life like never before – giving consumers access to an interactive experience like none other.

For the first time, consumers aren’t just watching ads – they’re part of the experience and can interact with them directly.

Admmersion.com comes to us from DCSI, a company that according to its site, specializes in those LCD screens at grocery stores that show endless ads. It's good to see they are trying to diversify their business.

Augmented Comedy

Augmented Comedy

When I get sick of all that marker-based novelty augmented-reality, I protest and complain. But it seems that when Anatoly Zenkov had the same feelings, he created the first (?) comedic clip about AR, entitled "Me Too":


Me too (doing some AR stuff)! from Anatoly Zenkov on Vimeo.

Living Sasquatch - First Boffswana Ad

Living Sasquatch - First Boffswana Ad

Link Snacks, manufacturer of Jack Link's Beef Jerkey has adopted Bigfoot for their "feed your wild side" campaign. Like so many campaigns these days, this one also uses (novelty) augmented reality for that additional magical touch. It's actually quite sophisticated, allowing you to compose a short animation for Bigfoot to carry out (using 35 pre-created animations), as can be seen in the following video:


Living Sasquatch - Papervision - Augmented Reality from Boffswana on Vimeo.

It's a pity you can't automatically upload your animation to Youtube, and have to first download them to your computer, hurting the "virality" of this campaign. It's been alive for a few days now, and still no one uploaded his animation to Youtube. Another possible improvement could have been using Jack Link's Beef Jerkey bags as some kind of special markers, opening up some secret movements for Bigfoot.
Anyway, you can play with it yourself and see other's videos at the campaign's site. This marks the first commercial use of Boffswana's Releas3D technology.

Now, who will be the first to upload an erotic video featuring Bigfoot taking a page from Spore?

link (via ARTweets)

ARvertising

ARvertising

You knew it was coming.
Spanish designer Diego Gopen (linkedin page) has done what I'm surprised no one has done before. He recently registered the domain arvertising.com, promising to provide a service that would change the world of advertisement. You guessed it folks - he's gonna use augmented reality to do so.

ARvertising is the new shiny star of the non conventional marketing. It came from the mix between AR (Augmented Reality) + advertising.

and

This is not advertising.
But ARvertising.

What´s coming out if we mix "Magic Realism" artistic genre, a door-to-door sales man, a mirror and the very top technology?
We have the answer. And its much more impressive that what you imagine...

Technology wise, he seems to use the plain old FLARToolKit, but since the site still lacks any substantial details, this is only an educated guess due to how he tagged the videos he uploaded to Youtube:



As you may tell, I'm a bit pissed off. First, this is another instance of novelty AR, bringing augmented reality closer to being a fad that will be tossed away by the general public the next season. Then, I'm also angry at myself, for not registering that domain myself. Surely I could have made a few bucks ...

Weekly Linkfest

Weekly Linkfest

That was quite a week, and we have plenty of augmented reality related links from all over the web:

• The next hardware version of the iPhone comes with a digital compass, or so the rumor goes, which, I suspect, will give a major push to augmented reality applications.
• "Introduction to augmented reality", this video teaches the basics of programming with FLARToolKit
  
• "Assassin's Creed 2", which is a game by Ubisoft to be released next winter, uses augmented reality in its promotional site. Pointing specific markers at your web-cam, unlocks secret content about the game. If you are interested, you can read the full story here (which I didn't), or you can just see how it looks like in the following Youtube clip. For another usage of AR as a locking mechanism, look at the video below.
  
• Yet another company using AR for its promotional campaign is Doritos. It's a month old, and I've missed it when it was fresh. Nothing more than novelty AR.
• Hotolag is a french service that let you leave a message to your friends, exposed when they present a marker at their web-cam. We saw a better service, similar to this one, last valentine. (via Le5emeP.fr).
• Replace your head with an "Hello Kitty" character, I know you want to. This is a bit more sophisticated than your usual marker based AR, as the character is chosen according to the marker you hold in your hands (and not placed near your head itself). (via development memo for ourselves)

And since it's Easter, two videos this time -
This smart fellow used FLARToolKit to create a combination lock:


And Ori pointed to the next clip from 2004 (if I recall correctly), preceding int13's April fool's hoax by a couple of years, and doing that feat for real.

Stop Using AR to Sell CARS

Stop Using AR to Sell CARS

Advertisers learned a new trick and they are over using it. If last year was the year of viral marketing, featuring unbelievable videos on Youtube, this year seams to be the year of augmented marketing. Leading the way (to over exposure) is the car industry. Here's a list of previous attempts to "excite us":

• December 2008: Ford Ka.
  
• December 2008: BMW Mini.
• February 2009: Citroën C3 Picasso (by Total-Immersion).
  
• February 2009: Toyota iQ.
• February 2009: Nissan Cube.

And now (April 2009), BMW Z4:



And you can even share your creations on Facebook. That's just ... great.
(Ori wrote on the same topic a month ago)

Updates:

• May 2009: Nissan has a grand site promoting their new fleet of cars, all done with AR.
• June 2009: The new Fiat Linea has an AR campaign in Argentina.
• June 2009: Fiat 500c
  
• July 2009: Kia Soul has an AR app on Facebook by Total Immersion.
• August 2009: Peugeot 3008 campaign in Turkey.
• September 2009: Citroën DS3.
• September 2009: Seat at the International Motor Show.
• November 2009: Dodge Avenger
• December 2009: Mazda 2 at the LA Auto Show.
• February 2010: Czech ad for Peugeot 5008.
• February 2010: Infinity G

Playing with AR at YDreams

Playing with AR at YDreams

Yes, I linked to the following video on Sunday


Playing in an Augmented World from YDreams on Vimeo.

Usually I refrain from re-posting old news, but Antão from YDreams (the guy in the red shirt) has contacted me and gave some technical info, so I'll let this one slip by in order to encourage others to send me news and other AR tidbits. My address is right there on the right panel. Anyway, so says Antão:

The applications use face and blob detection. Although the virtual objects move on a 2D plane, they are 3D objects and react using 3D physics. The interaction can be extended to be in real 3D. The applications take advantage of the modern multi-core CPUs (computer vision, behaviors and physics run in separate cores) .
...
We are using a proprietary development platform, codenamed YVision. It was developed on .NET 3.5 and uses open-source libraries like OpenCV, Ogre and ODE. The computer vision algorithms are the ones supplied by OpenCV, with a little magic added by us. ;-)
The applications were running on a Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Duo E7200 @ 2.53GHz with an NVIDIA GeForce 9400 GT (a regular off-the-shelf PC). Computer vision running on one core, while behaviors and physics were running on the other core.

They have submitted this video to MIX09 ShowOff contest, so feel free going over there and to vote for them.

Weekly Linkfest & Site News

Weekly Linkfest & Site News

Some other AR news from around the web:

• Mobilizy the company behind Wikitude, is now developing an application named Zenith to augment your night skies. "You point your camera at the night sky - and get a star map", according to this article from the BBC. A very cool (and relatively simple) idea!
• Robert Rice relaunched Neogence's site. Still not a lot of info about what they are all about.
• YDreamers are playing in an augmented world.
• In 2002 we were promised augmented reality navigation systems for our cars. I, for one, am still waiting.
  

Some news concerning this site:

• Please welcome our newest tag - "Novelty AR". I'll use this tag to mark any post that concerns augmented reality that was done in the sake of augmented reality and not much more. Usually this definition fits all those AR projects that augment a very specific item, and don't really augment reality, such as Topps' augmented baseball cards, the Mini ad and GE's smart grid. I took the term "Novelty AR" from Robert Rice who defined it as “cool for five minutes but ultimately a waste of time.”
• If you have any AR related news, please contact me. My address is right there on the right panel.