This week wasn’t defined by cool videos and nice looking demos, but on the bright side, there were a couple of interesting articles and interviews that will surely tickle your mind:
Programmer Joe (part one) – “Augmented reality should be open” argues that AR should use open protocols and standards in order to flourish as the web did. Robert Rice has a rebuttal on Curious Raven that although openness is positive, AR should not be compared with the web. I’ll have a longer post about it in the next couple of days (once I’ll iron out the last creases).
In somewhat of the same vein, Blair MacIntyre interviews to blogtalkradio, and talks about how AR should be and what challenges (aside from the obvious technical ones) we are facing (I’ll be definitely listen to this interview at least once more).
This week’s video is a silly augmented reality tribute to Michael Jackson (please don’t get offended if you are MJ fans, I don’t say he was silly, I just don’t think highly of this tribute). You can try it yourself over here.
That is, to London’s subway system. Most tourist facing augmented reality applications are focused on landmarks. But, there’s an even more important issue affecting a tourist’s visit to an unknown city – how to get around. The city’s residents know perfectly well where’s the closest subway station that will serve their needs, but a tourist needs to constantly look at maps and look around herself.
To the rescue comes AcrossAir, a British mobile application development company. They have created a simple, yet useful, iPhone application, that shows you where’s the nearest tube station. When held horizontally, the application behaves quite like a map, but when the phone is tilted upwards, bubbles signifying stations’ presence are overlayed on the video feed. Obviously, this only works on the new iPhone 3GS, since it requires a compass reading.
Here’s some obvious further directions from the top of my head, this kind of app could follow:
Add more cities around the world, New York should probably be the first.
Add more public transportation options, such as buses and regular overground trains.
Add route planning, so the application will also recommend which station best suits your needs.
Some real time info will be great, like knowing when the next train is due.
Make it work underground (using cellular tower triangulation in lieu of GPS read), so commuters can be advised where to get off a train, and which line should they take next.
So there’s much room to innovate, even in such a niche application.
Dutch website (what’s with all those Dutch companies lately?) YouTellMe.com, which specializes in social shopping online (e.g. recommendation engines) has just launched a new augmented reality application, letting you see how your favorite electronic products look like in the palm of your hand (or in your living room).
By harnessing the power of your webcam, Flash, and probably FlarToolKit (though, I failed to prove it), you can now try the new iPhone, or that Canon camera you always coveted:
Actually, since style and appearance play a big part these days when we are out to buy a new gadget, I can imagine such an application would have a market (much like those magic mirrors that let you try on jewelery and accessories). Though, IMHO, it could be much improve if instead of simply printing a marker, you would be able to print a simple paper-craft box with markers on its sides, that although will require some folding, will give you some more “hands on” experience.
We are a collection of augmented reality (AR) enthusiasts and professionals (from business and academia), who have been working on a multitude of AR apps for the iPhone. These apps are poised to change the way people interact with the real world.
But here is the rub: we are currently unable to publish these apps on the app store because the iPhone SDK lacks public APIs for manipulating live video.
We are asking Apple to provide a public API to access live video in real time, on the iPhone.
We will be happy to offer additional technical details.
The impact of augmented reality (AR) on our lives could be as significant as the introduction of the PC.
In 10 years, we believe augmented reality will change the way everyone experiences travel, design, training, personal productivity, health care, entertainment, games, art, and advertising (videos).
Looking back just a few years, AR pioneers had to hack a slew of components into ridiculously large backpacks and HUDs, and be confined to rigged environments. Nowadays, it comes in friendly, affordable packages and the iPhone is one of the first devices to have it all – except for a public API.
The battle to determine the winning device has already begun; a public API to access live video will give the iPhone a lucrative ticket to compete.
We believe Apple has a window of opportunity of about 3 months before developers start looking elsewhere. If Apple decides to publish the API in that time frame – in the next 10 years, everyone might be using the iPhone as the preferred device to interact with the real world.
Here is how augmented reality could open up new opportunities for the iPhone this year:
ARToolworks Releases Commercial License for FLARManager
ARToolworks is very pleased to announce that it is able to offer commercial licenses for the popular FLARManager software. FLARManager is a software framework developed by Eric Socolofsky that makes building FLARToolKit Flash based Augmented Reality applications easier.
FLARManager decouples the marker-tracking functionality from Papervision3D, and provides a more robust event-based system for managing marker addition, update, and removal. It supports detection and management of multiple patterns, and multiple markers of a given pattern.
Most importantly, FLARManager sits on top of FLARToolKit and makes it much faster and easier to develop flash based AR applications, typically half the time or less of developing a straight FLARToolKit application.
Philip Lamb, CTO of ARToolworks, says “We are delighted to be able to provide commercial license for this outstanding tool. This will enable FLARToolKit developers to build Flash AR applications quicker than ever before, and is the perfect compliment to our existing product line.”
FLARManager will continue to be freely available under a GPL license from http://www.facebook.com/l/;http://transmote.com/flar/, but ARToolworks has the exclusive rights to sell commercial licenses to those companies that do not want to share the source code of their applications as required by the GPL license.
The developer of FLARManager, Eric Socolofsky, says, “I’m excited to be able to offer FLARManager to both the commercial and experimental community. FLARManager began as an effort to bring FLARToolkit to a wider audience, and this commercial license will help to expand the reach of augmented reality and new interfaces to the web.”
For a limited time, ARToolworks is selling FLARManager for a reduced price of only $295 USD for a single product license, and also selling a discounted bundle of FLARToolKit and FLARManager licenses together. FLARToolKit is required to use FLARManager.
Please contact sales@artoolworks.com for more details.
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This week on the linkfest, it’s trains, snails and mobile phones:
Mobilizy released a new Wikitude version. I will use this opportunity to update my earlier post on IBM Wimbledon Seer application. Apparently, it was a joint work with Mobilizy and Ogilvy.
Two of my favorite things, augmented reality and artificial life are combined to create SimSnails, an educational demo about natural selection.
Google’s has it’s own version of Photosynth (and I guess they are not developing it for the sake of pure research).(and I guess they are not developing it for the sake of pure research).
AR around the world: German ad for Samsung mobile phones is using AR, and that’s about all I can tell you since I don’t speak German; Augmented Vision is a design project from the Netherlands that resembles Snaptell; A Japanese augmented Olympic game (via DMFO); And when it comes to this Indonesian application, I can’t tell you anything at all.
In last week’s linkfest I reported about the strange event named “The World Series Of ‘Tubing”, where two players play card war with Youtube videos render via augmented reality. Surely, such description doesn’t make the event any clearer, but luckily the guys behind it have put the following video on Youtube to explain it all:
Our inaugural post from early 2008: “Top 10 AR demos that will…” sparked huge interest. Since then, we have witnessed loads of AR games swarming the market.
Well, that may be an exaggeration – but the industry has certainly transitioned from delivering mere demos to actual games; from proof of concepts to commercial products; from “Yay” to “W00t!”
We have covered these AR games before, but Today is your chance to choose.
Vote for your all time favorite augmented reality games!
Our only rules for nomination:
1) It’s a fun game
2) It registers computer graphics on reality
3) It runs on commercial off the shelf hardware.
Here are the 18 nominees in chronological order (when first surfaced on the web):
go!
1. The Invisible Train
2004 – Graz University (PDA, Gizmondo)
2. Catapult
March 2006 – Gizmondo (Gizmondo)
3. Eye of Judgment
May 2006 – Sony (Sony EyeToy)
4. AR Tennis
June 2006 – Fanta/HIT Lab NZ (Nokia)
5. WizQubes
March 2007 – MXR
6. Level Head
October 2007 – Julian Oliver (webcam)
7. ARis
July 2008 – Geisha Entertainment (Webcam)
8. Kweekies
October 2008 – Int13 (Nokia, iPhone)
9. Ghostwire
October 2008 – A Different Game (Nintendo DSi, Nokia)
10. Tower of Defense
December 2008 – Sergey Ten
11. Topps
March 2009 – Total Immersion (Webcam)
12. Scope
March 2009 – Frantz Lasorne (Goggles)
13. Do the Dip
April 2009 – MacDonald’s (webcam)
14. ARhrrrr!
May 2009 – GA Tech (Nvidia Tegra)
15. Candy Wars
May 2009 – GA Tech (Gizmondo)
16. Art of Defense
May 2009 -GA Tech (Nokia)
17. RubberDuckzilla
May 2009 – Oasis (webcam)
18. InVizimals
June 2009 – Sony (PSP)
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Which are your favorites?
Share with your friends and find out their favorites! (share button at top right of page)
Los Angeles based, but Japanese named interactive marketing agency Zugara has launched a couple of days ago a new application named “The Webcam Social Shopper“.
Basically, it’s a magic mirror application that let’s you try on different clothes. But, there’s so much more to it – the user interface is engaged via motion detection, and you can take a photo of yourself with your new virtual clothes, and share it on facebook with your friend. However, one thing this application fails to do, is to show you whether any of the clothes fit, as they all stay static and don’t interact with your body movements. I don’t expect this application to improve the 3.57% conversion rate state in the next video.
Now, this application is only in alpha state, and a lot can change until it goes public. And admittedly, Zugara has some nice ideas on the future use cases of such application (e.g. shop together with your friends, online). Nevertheless, I think it’s too early for it to become useful. Maybe when Project Natal matures, but not now.
Oh, and lest I forget, this technology is patent pending. Great.
It was bound to happen. As augmented reality becomes more and more prevalent, it was all a matter of time till someone took credit for something he is probably not entitled for. Enter Chris Hughes best known for jailbreaking the first iPhone. Last February, at TED palmsprings, Hughes briefly showcased his work that “makes creating ‘augmented reality’ a cinch”.
(video was pulled down by TED, but here you can still watch it)
If this demo looks familiar to you, you are not alone. Ralph Hauwert, a Papervision3d developer, took offence at Hughes talk, and subsequent interview. According to Hauwert, Huges is taking credit for porting ARToolKit to flash, while he only took FLARToolKit and “followed a tutorial like this one from the FlashBlog, then gathered all his courage and energy to work with 2 opensource projects and take credit for it” (source).
Apparently, TED folks are working to fix things up. Till then, you can find more details over Hauwert’s blog.
[author comment: I published this post a few days ago at Augmented Times, and deemed as uninteresting enough for Games Alfresco. Per Ori's request, I repost it here as well. Since a few days have gone by, you might want to check the featured links for more up to date information]
Yep, it’s the silliest post title I’ve ever come up with. Nevertheless, this next video is really cool. It features both a robotic pool player and an augmented reality guidance system for human pool players (starting at 2:00).
It was developed by a team of researchers from Canada’s Queen’s university. Sadly, I couldn’t find much information about the augmented reality implementation. However, here’s an article about the robotic system, and I guess that once they implemented the robot, advancing to AR only required identifying the cue stick.
