Weekly Linkfest

Weekly Linkfest

Lots of exciting news this week!

• 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
• int13's ARDefender, which Ori described as the first fun AR game for the iPhone, is finally available on the appstore.
  
• Tonchidot lands $12 million in second round funding. Wow.
• Following this fund raising, the Wall Street Journal had a piece on what we can learn from Japan about the future of AR.
• I believe this is one of the most effective campaigns utilizing AR - protesting against the hunt of Siberian tigers.
• The virtual dressing room concept put into good use - augmented reality app lets women try on swimsuits virtually (via @ayaLAN).

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:



Have a great week!

Weekly Linkfest - The Lady Gaga Edition

Weekly Linkfest - The Lady Gaga Edition

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.

• Christopher Mitchell hacked together a Vuzix VR920 HUD and eeePC to create a basic facial recognition AR device for his master thesis.
• Augmented Planet posted their monthly report on AR application for the iPhone.
• 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.
• Twenty five of Lonely Planet’s travel guides get a dose of augmented reality, powered by Wikitude.
• 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:


Have a great (and cool) week!

Weekly Linkfest

Weekly Linkfest

After a month long hiatus, it's back! The weekly linkfest is here, with a fresh batch of links:

• Top headline of the week obviously goes to Qualcomm, which will launch a free vision based AR framework for Android this fall. In order to encourage developers to use their SDK, Qualcomm holds a contest for best use of the framework, first prize is $125000. I have to get myself an Android phone and start working on that AR Farmville concept! Who's with me?
  
• int13 (missed you guys!) brings very smooth marker based augmented reality to the feeble Nintendo DSi. They're also submitting AR games to Samsung's Bada store.
• French Laster Technologies creates AR eyewear that isn't revolting (at that's a complement!)
  
• Layar now used as an art canvas in an interesting project with a Dutch museum.
• Yes, you can even market cancer using augmented reality.
  

Video of the week shows a social hacking feat which will probably become a common practice as AR goes mainstream. Mark Skwarek and Joseph Hocking created “The leak in your home town”, an augmented reality application for the iPhone, which displays a virtual oil spill whenever you set the phone's camera on a BP logo. Don't expect to see it on the AppStore anytime soon. (via Beyond the Beyond):



Happy 4th of July to our American visitors!

Weekly Linkfest

Weekly Linkfest

This week was dominated by the Parrot's ARDrone, which is just about the coolest toy I've seen in a while, made even cooler by augmented reality from our friends at int13. Other AR news articles making the rounds this week:

• Techcrunch (1) discovers the VR versus AR Google trends graph. I think just about every other AR blog featured it at some moment.
• The Guardian had an interesting article (featuring this blog) "Seven things you need to know about augmented reality" followed by a piece about AR and the future of journalism.
• Laboratory 4 had a nice roundup on the current state of AR "The reality of augmented reality" that got a follow up by Blair MacIntyre.
• Techcrunch (2) covered yet another AR browser named Nomao.
• And yet another brand of sugary cereals use AR to augmented its boxes.

Our weekly video comes from Techcrunch (3), and I'm quite sure most of you will find it non-AR. Yet, since it really makes you see things differently, exposing hidden information not available to most of us in any other way, I tend to call it AR. It's called SnapTax, and it helps you fill up your taxes by taking a picture of your tax forms (if you are a US citizen).



Have a great week!

French Augmented Reality Special!

French Augmented Reality Special!

France celebrates today the Bastille Day, and it's a fantastic opportunity to have a quick review at all the French AR companies we have covered previously on this blog. If I happen to miss your favorite company, please forgive me (I rushed this post), and please leave a comment so I may update this post later.

Total Immersion
Almost every other week we feature a new AR application by the French AR powerhouse Total Immersion, but my favorite thus far was this AR ride they installed at Le Futuroscope:

LES ANIMAUX DU FUTUR, BANDE ANNONCE DE L'ATTRACTION
by Futuroscope-TV

int13
We all know Int13 from their innovative Kweekies game, but do you remember this amazing real/virtual world interaction?



FittingBox & Alessandro 1313
We covered FittingBox in this post, discussing magic-mirrors. They specialize in letting you virtually try on glasses and shades and made the quite famous Ray-Ban's application.
As for Alessandro 1313, we haven't covered them before. As a matter of fact, I don't know much about them. They operate the site EnjoySunglasses.com which looks like it's using FittingBox technology (and they link to FittingBox from their blog), but I may be wrong.





Ubisoft
Ubisoft is better known for its computer games, but they also collaborated with Microsoft France in turning your MSN Messenger into an AR experience:

Augmented April Fools Day

Augmented April Fools Day

SPOILER ALERT - do not read on, if you don't want to spoil yourself the surprise, though this is one is a pretty obvious hoax.
















int13 brings us the best augmented reality related hoax ever*!



More here

* And probably the first one ever, as well.