As you may have guessed this passing week was very slow in augmented reality news (or any news for that matter). Nevertheless, I scoured the web and bring you this weekly linkfest.
Last week I reported on the winter crop of augmented reality games coming from Qualcomm AR Game Studio. The videos of three more games were recently uploaded, so be sure to check them up.
DOMO, Tonchidot's newest project, aspires to enable transparent society, where you could see everyone's thoughts and interests.
Open question on Quora - What will be the most important developments in augmented reality in 2011? I tried giving my best answer, though you may disagree with me. (via @TishShute)
What a better way to start the new year than playing a round of augmented golf? That's exactly what the students at Rochester Institute of Technology thought when they came up with this game that doesn't require an entire fairway.
This past week, Metaio held their first insideAR conference and thankfully have uploaded all the videos from the event within a few days. Some interesting stuff there, which I'll cover tomorrow.
Speaking of Metaio, Tish Shute held another of her in depth interviews, this time with Metaio's CEO, Thomas Alt
As for this week's video, we have Sky Canvas, an iPhone application with a brilliant concept behind it, from Shiodome Innovation Studio, Japan. A part of their PaPaCo Design Project, Shiodome tried to create an application that can be played together by a father and his son. With Sky Canvas, the two can form clouds in the shape of animals by tapping and blowing air to the microphone. Unfortunately, the app is not available outside of Japan, so I can't really test it, but as you surely have understood by now, I dig the concept:
Celebrating Ben Affleck's 38th birthday, here's this week's linkfest:
"Augspace has turned the city into an onion -- if every layer of the onion had a distinct flavor"; Everything is Clickable - a look a futuristic augmented day by Jack Graham (via @chrisgrayson)
Ever wondered who's the most influential twitter user among the AR crowd? According to peerindex.net it's none other than Tonchidot's Takahito Iguchi, though you are more than welcome to follow me
Today's video is of a project named "SMSlingshot" by the guys at VR/Urban (also check the link for its predecessor, the Spreadgun). As you can guess by its name, it's a slingshot that throws short text messages at walls (aided by a powerful projector). The results are quite beautiful:
This linkfest has nothing to do with Lady Gaga, and everything to do with augmented reality news bites from the last week. I'm just checking if the mere inclusion of miss Gaga in the title will generate more hits.
I'm terribly late on this, but apparently on ARE 2010, Georgia Tech previewed their open source and open standards Kamra Mobile AR Browser. Have to thank Chris Grayson for bringing it to my attention.
Samsung's Bada mobile OS seems to be the hip place for AR games development. This time it's our pals at int13 with their release of ARDefender game.
Metaio is holding a one day long conference called insideAR. I usually don't promote such events, but they got me when they bundled it with Oktoberfest. Augmented reality and Beer, a match made in heaven?
This week's video is a promotion video for Sekai Camera. Tonchidot, the company behind this veteran AR browser recently got a $5M from Japan's telecom giant KDDI (though some claim that KDDI actually bought Tonchidot). And if that's not enough, Tonchidot announced the creation of social AR game. The future looks bright for those guys:
This is the last linkfest for this year. Though there were many more Christmas spectacles this week, I'm going to keep this linkfest holiday-spirit free (broke my nose, not feeling very festive).
Robert Rice on 2010, the first year in the decade of ubiquity - "The point though, is that all of these things calling themselves augmented reality now are just the start. Everyone is getting their feet wet, experimenting, exploring, and beginning to innovate. We can argue about what is or isn’t augmented reality, but it doesn’t really matter. What does matter is the continual push for advancing the technology, the industry, and getting people to start using it".
On the same theme, Edo Segal writes for Techcrunch about the dawn of ambient streams - "Increasingly, we will be sensing the world with this sixth sense and that will change the way we collectively experience the world. Going back to the point made earlier, the watershed event is when we will be experiencing this “ambient sense" without being in a retrieval mode (i.e. not when we go to the computer or our mobile device"
Whisper Deck is a cool voice operated AR interface
Point your sneakers to your webcam in order to feel silly. Which should be on Mashable's 10 awesome uses of AR in marketing list (what, only one car campaign? seriously, where's that GE ad that started the fad?)
This week's video is of a projected AR system coming to us from the University of Magdeburg, Germany. Though we have seen quite a few systems like that over the past years (even one coming out from Microsoft), I don't think we have seen any as slick as that. You can read how it works (magic! infra-red markers) at New Scientist (via Augmented Engineering).
This week's video is of Ogmento's Brian Selzer evangelistic talk at the Humanity+ conference "Reinventing Reality with AR" . Though most of his examples should be familiar to this blog's patrons, he is a really good talker, and I've enjoyed the whole 15 minutes of his presentation (via GigantiCo):
[Games Alfresco readers, go to Gigantico to see the clip if it doesn't work for you]
Metaio announces the coming release of Junaio, but doesn't give much information about what Junaio really is.
And in other news:
Total Immersion now enters the world of soccer trading cards, at least in Italy.
You can get pregnant without the morning sickness via the wonders of Flash based AR.
The Virtec project is a thesis project using AR to teach about Aztec culture by means of a book and a head mounted display.
This week's video revisits one of this blog's reoccurring themes, the Transformers (previously here and here). This application comes with the Transformers coming DVD, or as this trailer puts it "Prepare for Augmented Reality! An exclusive 3D Holographic Experience!":
Actually, it was a relatively quiet week in the ARSphere. Here are some links to news bits that I haven't had the time to cover over here:
In the mobile AR front:
Kooaba is an iPhone application that much like Snaptell (or Nokia's "Point and Find") lets you take a picture of a product and get information about it. Now they venture into the realm of AR browsers, but since they fail to show their image-based browser working on a real iPhone, I'll remain skeptic for now.
Cyborg is an AR application that helps you find the cheapest gas station around. Yes, they could do that with a simple map, but that's like having a web 2.0 site without rounded corners.
And if you live in Hong Kong, forget about gas prices, just use this application to find the nearest train.
Augmented reality wiki - what a fab idea! (especially considering the dire state of the "augmented reality" article at Wikipedia).
AdoptMe.com offers you to adopt augmented pets. Haven't tested it, but seems quite shabby (it's like the site's design was taken from 1996).
This week video comes from Techcrunch's favorite Tonchidot, makers of the Sekai Camera. Apparently their application was finally submitted to the iPhone's appstore, and we may soon compare it to other AR browsers. The next video is indeed in Japanese, but starting from 0:45 you can easily understand what's going on, even if you are not a native Japanese speaker. It certainly has some Japanese flair to it:
Continuing my coverage of the augmented reality browser wars, here are the latest news (well, some of them are a few days old, excuse me for procrastinating a bit):
AcrossAir is not satisfied with letting you find the closest subway station in London (where it's called The Tube), it also has its sights on the NY subway system:
If you remember correctly, Mobilizy, makers of Wikitude, claimed AcrossAir's application demo is nothing but a mock-up. Seems real to me. Anyway, Mobilizy is working hard to remind people that Wikitude augmented the world way before SPRXMobile's Layar. Moreover, one of their tweets suggests that Layar was based on Wikitude's technology. Indeed, SPRXMobile did cooperate with Mobilizy once, when creating their ATM finder, but it doesn't prove that Layar is Wikitude in disguise. Mobilizy also released this video demoing their Wikitude API, and did not miss the opportunity to include some sarcastic remark towards its end:
And in the Eastern front, TechCrunch reports on the almost final version of Tonchidot's Sekai Camera. Compared this video -
With what we have been promised a year ago:
Well, at least they still have something to aspire to.
One of this blogger's favorite things is being critical of Tonchidot's Sekai Camera. After all, their so called revolutionary technology is nothing more than GPS based augmented reality. Problem is, there is not much information about them, so I had only a small number of opportunities to mock them (here and here). Now I've found two new videos starring Takahito Iguchi, Tonchidot's CEO, on Dailymotion.com. Both originate from what seems to be a european tour held last month by Iguchi. The first video is a short interview, looking for Iguchi's sources of inspiration, which you can see here. More interesting is the second video, where Iguchi demos Sekai Camera on the Marketing 2.0 conference held in France. He stops reading from his papers and starts demoing at about 7 minutes in, and I think it's the best overview on how the Sekai Camera works we've seen till now:
I believe it's the first time we see that one can use this application to leave vocal notes. Even better, one can use it to hit on girls. Two other things to notice is the Air Pocket service, that lets you save to your device notes of a specific location, and the Air Filter service that lets you filter the notes visible to you according to several parameters. Still, I don't think that Air Filter alone is going to be enough in order to fight the spam that will plague this application if it ever becomes popular.
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?
Once again Techcrunch (or rather MobileCrunch) has an exclusive on Tonchidot's Sekai Camera (here's last time). This time, the news are coming from an Android event held by Nikkei, apparently Japan's leading business newspaper, where the first version of Sekai Camera for Google's Android was exposed. Unlike the iPhone version, this one utilizes the built-in compass to narrow the number of items displayed on the screen. The result is still far from impressive
Yes, I know this is only the first version, and things will look better when the application is released. However, I still suspect that without any image recognition, the usefulness of Sekai camera will be limited to the outdoors (where it would compete with Wikitude), whilst it would need a way to filter spam in indoors environments.
Tonchidot, the Japanese company that created quite a buzz half a year ago when presenting its "Sekai Camera" at Techcrunch50 is at it again. The Sekai Camera is an iPhone application which enables the user to add tags to any place (be it a store or a tourist attraction) and see how other users previously tagged the same place by looking at it through the iPhone's camera. All that, without any image recognition and keeping in mind that the iPhone does not have a built-in compass to detect the direction the user is looking to. No wonder some have thought the following video was contrived and the Sekai Camera is too good to be true :
Guess what, it is too good to be true (but at least it's not vaporware). Techcrunch now reports about a private demo that Tonchidot arranged in Tokyo. Apparently, the Sekai Camera really doesn't know at what the user looks through her iPhone, and she has to pick from the available options:
Many people speculated how Sekai Camera works technically. The answer is simple: The user’s location is identified through GPS (no cell-tower triangulation or image recognition technology is being used). As the iPhone doesn’t have an internal compass, the direction of where the viewfinder is pointed at can’t be measured: Users need to flick fingers left or right to find relevant tags that are around them (as demonstrated in the video I took below). Tap a tag and the information it contains appears in the form of a window, for example a picture with a comment box below it or a voice message someone left earlier.
It can still work and become a great success, but I'll go with Wikitude for now. Anyway, here's how it looks now, you may compare it in your spare time against the previous one
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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