Weekly Linkfest

Weekly Linkfest

How are terracotta warriors, billiard, a coloring book and the city of Basel all related to each other? Well... they are featured in this week's linkfest:

• Augmented reality glasses decipher emotional cues from other people, increase emotional intelligence. While other, concept, glasses strive to make those cues more visible (but since it's not AR, it's cheating).
  
• Kraft is one conglomerate which is openly skeptical about augmented reality (via @bdwassom).
• Developers, rejoice! Our old friends at YDreams have released a beta version of YVision, a natural user interface SDK that has computer vision and a physics engine baked into it.
• HitLab NZ introduces first(?) coloring book that comes to life with a bit of augmented reality.
  
• If you are a Layar developer, AR-4-Basel may be the contest for you (via @genebecker).
• Two years ago I wrote about Deep Green the robotic, augmented reality pool player from Canada. Now a student from Germany created a mini version.
• Terracotta warriors come alive - not another zombie movie, but rather an AR iPhone game.
  

This week's video is just strange. 

An augmented reality artwork created by John Goto and Matthew Leach using the Layar platform, Gilt City confronts the banking crisis in an unusual way. Famous beggars appear on your mobile's screen, and you choose whether to help them, or make them explode. Art - I'll never understand it, but maybe you will, by reading more about this project here.



Have a grand week!

Weekly Linkfest

Weekly Linkfest

As expected, this linkfest is full of ARE2010 stuff:

• Three of #ARE2010 are online - Bruce Sterling, Will Wright and Jesse Schell. I'm still looking for the Blaise Aguera y Arcas one.
  
• Google Goggles project manager Shailesh Nalawadi confirmed at ARE2010 once again that Goggles is coming to the iPhone soon.
  
• Total Immersion created a sort of "AR inside" logo to be freely used by the community.
  
• YDreams won the first Auggie demo competition.
  
• Metaio announced two exciting partnerships, the first with Kooaba adding vision based AR to Junaio on the Android. The other is with YOUReality to improve their eCommerce solutions.
  
• Not one, but two applications wants you to spray graffiti via augmented reality - TagDis which takes a game approach, and ARstreets.
• ReadWriteWeb on how AR helps doctors save lives (also check out one my early posts about AR used to train doctors).
  
• And finally, if ARE2010 left you hungry for more and speak Italian, maybe you'll find IAR2010 interesting.

This week's video is not from ARE2010, but cool nonetheless. EXMAR is a conceptual periscope-like device that attaches to your mobile phone and lets you see an augmented view of your surrounding without pointing directly at anything. It's great for minimizing hand strain, looking behind you and admittedly for perverts. Created by students at Korea's KAIST institute, the related paper was submitted to ISMAR10 but is not available online as far as I can tell



Have a great week, see you back on the 20th (unless my flight will be canceled again).

Weekly Linkfest

Weekly Linkfest

The last weekly linkfest before the augmented reality event, and the last one in the next couple of weeks. Here's what happened this week in the world of augmented reality:

• Got half a hour? See this fine documentary about AR from Bloomberg.com.
  
• While I'm writing posts, Ori scores some VC bucks - Ogmento raised $3.5M and is now looking to recruit new employees.
  
• YDreams and 3d scene analysis chip maker Canesta team together to develop AR application. I've high expectations from those two. They could make a better augmented air guitar, for example.
  
• Late last year I've predicted that 2010 will see the publication of an augmented Playboy edition. This concept video shows what it might look like (safe for work).
• Space InvadAR is supposedly the first vision based AR game. It's not, and some would argue it's not a game at all (no way to win), but it's a good start for maker Zenitum.

This week's video is a video presentation for QderoPateo's Ouidoo, the articulated naturality device. I don't know if it's official, but seeing this video I understand why the avoid using the term augmented reality. A much better term is surrealism:

QderoPateo Ouidoo. Video presentation. from Vladimir Shelest on Vimeo.

Have a great week, see you in ARE2010!

Weekly Linkfest

Weekly Linkfest

Still waiting for Junaio.

In the meantime the backlash against augmented reality (and the hype bubble surrounding it) has begun, with PSFK's "Is Augmented Reality The Next Second Life?", Fast Company's "Put Your Phone Down: Augmented Reality Is Overblown" and Techdirt's critique of gimmicky AR applications. Even Zugara has called on bloggers to cool down the hype. The best of its kind is BusinessWeek's "Augmented Reality: Getting Beyond the Hype" (you should read this article):

The industry could battle the hype and mislabeling by establishing standards the rest of us can understand. Otherwise, augmented reality will quickly meet the same fate as "green" products: Marketers will advertise even the slightest of augments as "augmented reality," leaving consumers confused and bewildered.

On the other hand there's Robert Rice's reply to that Fast Company article.
Well, I don't think that anyone will deny there's a lot of of hype around augmented reality at the moment, and I'm sure most believe that augmented reality has a great potential. It is my humble opinion that really exciting AR is still a few years away and in order to get there, we need to keep the hype at bay. As Rice writes, there's a fine line between evangelizing and hyping, and we should be careful not to cross it. Not that it's going to help, as many startups are pumping air into the bubble, hoping for an exit before it bursts.

Oh, and in other news:

• YDreams's Antão Almada's impressions from ISMAR.
• Mobile application (videos for your pleasure): Browser for parks, finding your car with Car Finder, inserting UFOs and witches to photograph with MagiCam, and LocFinder a well designed "AR" version of a compass.
• And yet another augmented reality business card (YAARBC?), even two.
  
• Novelty, Gimmicky, AR app for the San Antonio Spurs, whatever.
  

This week's video is of an art performance named .txt , that features a tag cloud haunting a dancer. I'm not an art critique, so I can say anything about the performance itself, but technology wise, it's using YDreams' YVision for real time interaction between the dancer and words (via @YDreams):

.txt interactive digital performance - excerpt#1 from ponto txt on Vimeo.

Have a nice week!

Weekly Linkfest

Weekly Linkfest

While reading this week's linkfest you may find some links are missing - don't worry, many ISMAR related links and videos will be posted later this week.

• "There will be at least one terrorist attack that has used mobile augmented reality for planning, practice, and execution.", this is just one of many predicitons by Robert Rice for the augmented world of 2012.


• Read Write Web theorize on why VCs aren't backing AR startups, and Robert Rice shares his experience. Well, according to ABI Research augmented reality will be a 350$ million market in 2014. That's actually a pretty small figure (especially for a technology that aims to change the world), so maybe VCs just don't see the next Youtube in it.


• Browsers: Loopt acquires GraffitiGeo, while Layar gets funded. Still, new browsers appear everyday, like Stalqer which is for stalking your friends, and lest us forget about AugSatNav, which is not new, but I've never found the time to write about.


• Of course, this coming week will see the appearance of the highly anticipated Junaio from Metaio. Metaio has realeased a new video for the occasion and we get to read Gene Becker's impressions.


• Thomas K. Carpenter on recreating the past using augmented reality.


• It always looks like the guys at YDreams are having lots of fun. This time they are playing soccer. Without a real ball.


• Campaigns: Esquire made Robert Downey Junior sit on a very big marker, SAP shows its line of products with an augmented rubik cube (warning! a very annoying narrator), there's a street fighter like augmented reality game to promote the G.I.Joe DVD (what's a summer blockbuster without some augmented love) and you can become an elephant in this British campaign to ban the use of wild animals from circuses.

Although Halloween was yesterday, and I've dedicated a whole post to Halloween related AR, here's another cute scarry example found by Bruce Sterling. Actually is part of a campaign to promote eco-friendly chargers and power managemant systems, and you can try it yourself here.



Have a nice week!

Weekly Linkfest

Weekly Linkfest

Let's try to make this week's linkfest as concise as possible:

• Tish Shute interviews Bruno Uzzan, CEO of Total Immersion for UgoTrade.
• Blair Mcintyre: "Has AR taken off? Is it finally here?", check out the quote below.
  
• Augmented reality tested on board the international space station, to help astronauts in maintenance tasks.
• Another pseudo-AR game whose goal is to catch ethereal creatures - Fairy Trails.
• Intel looks into augmented reality devices.
• Total Immersion (those from the first bullet) created a bumping-cars game for Six Flags.
• You know that AR is really hot when (French) politicians start to use it in their press conferences (powered again by Total Immersion).
  

AR Browsers:

• Presselite's application is now named Bionic Eye.
• AcrossAir's Nearest Wiki overlays reality with relevant Wikipedia articles (video).
  
• The NorwegianYellow Pages lets you find a plumber via augmented reality.
  
• Insqribe offers a mobile AR platform for sale
• And RobotVision was featured on TechCrunch.
  

Ad campaigns of the week:

• Healthy Choice
• MTS (a mobile operator in Russia) (video)
• Malwee Brazil uses Augmented Reality to sell clothes, I think (video)
  
• Michael Jackson Opus book comes with augmented reality, I have so many nasty jokes to tell, but I'll spare you (via Augmented Planet)
  

This week's quote comes from Blair's post I've mentioned above (and yes, I took it out of context, because I'm a blogger!):

Now that the time is here, now that the promised AR apps can be published in the iTunes store, will they be able to live up to their claims, or will they (and their claims) fade away? I suspect things will die down for a little while. At least, I hope things die down for a while

And this week's video comes from YDreams, and you have probably seen it before. It's called Flyar, and it's an interactive screen saver that shows you Twitter updates with birds that respond to your hand-gestures, a la EyeToy. Yeah, the video makes it clearer:

Flyar: Augmented Reality Twitter Visualization App from YDreams on Vimeo.

Have a nice week!

Weekly Linkfest

Weekly Linkfest

Hope you didn't miss the weekly linkfest's early edition, published yesterday, covering some of the best articles, posts and talks that were published during the week. Here are some more interesting bits from around the AR ecosystems making news this week:

• I forgot to mention it last week - here's augmented.org review of augmented reality at SIGGRAPH 2009
• Wired: Augmented reality? More like awkward hilarity. "these days the technical wizardry of AR has become edgy and chic – a way to boost the geek-cred of artists and designers. But there are still many limitations to the technology that can render the experience as something more akin to Uncle George than Gandalf."
• According to this article, IKEA has an application for you mobile phone so you could try furniture at your own house via AR (a favorite topic on this blog), but I can't find any other article to support it.
• Bruce Thomas from the University of South Australia gives a lecture on mobile augmented reality.
  
• Oh my guide! is an interesting concept AR application to help tourists that visit Milan for world expo 2015 to find a local to guide them to their destination. Obviously not feasible today, but maybe in 5 years mobile phones will support this level of augmentation. (via The Future Digital Life)
• A short video demoing the new features in Layar 2.0. I think that although the grid was easy to implement, it adds quite a lot to the experience. Here's a list of the currently available layers. Would one of my readers sponsor an Android phone for a poor blog writer?
  
• Antoher AR application showing off a new interface is SREngine Lite, in this new video.
• Thomas Carpenter brings us another tutorial on using Metaio's Unifeye Design.
  
• Funky video from YDreams, showcasing their site seeing viewer.
  
• iPhone Satellite finder uses augmented reality, sort of.
  
• Peugeot has an AR campaign in Turkey, obviously they haven't heard of my campaign to ban augmented reality when it comes to selling cars.

And finally, this week video comes from Hongik University of South Korea. It shows a project named "Will be", created in 2004 (and presented in ISMAR05), which is the augmented reality take on a story board. It's quite nice, though some of the features could have been more accessible if they were implemented via standard GUI, rather than ARUI:

Weekly Linkfest

Weekly Linkfest

Some other augmented reality news from around the web:

• Microsoft uses a cheap AR trick to promote the new SQL server
• YDream's "Playing in an Augmented World" (which we mentioned here) wins honorable mention at the MIX09 showoff competition. Congrats Antão and team!
• Games Alfresco: ArToolKit Wins the Oscar of Virtual Reality
• Inspiring low-income youth using augmented reality part one and two, an initiative by these guys.
  

And we could not avoid embedding videos of two of the augmented reality games presented at the Game Development Conference (Ori was first to report about those two):

• Killing zombies on Nvidia's Tegra (by Georgia Tech):
  


• PIT Strategy, an augmented reality board game, by Beyond Reality
  

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.