A new (media) power in the race for augmented reality supremacy

Posted on May 29, 2008 by Ori Inbar

Media Power announced today a donation of $5M to the GVU research center at Georgia Tech – for the advancement of Mobile Augmented Reality (http://www.cc.gatech.edu/news/media-power-donates-5m-to-gvu-center).
It’s intriguing that Media Power’s founder is none other than the controvertial Carl Freer, the executive from Gizmondo – a mobile game device that went belly up “under a cloud” after demostrating huge potential in 2005. Although it made it to the #1 position of “The 10 Worst-Selling Handhelds of All Time” on gamepro it was pretty popular among mobile augmented reality research(Demo).

So now Carl will not only resurrect Gizmondo, but will also establish a new division – Magitech – “centered around the very promising field of Augmented Reality”.
The objective of the joint initiative between Magitech and Georgia Tech is to “envision, prototype and evaluate the next generation of mobile AR games and entertainment applications and positions the company as a leader in AR.”

This initiative looks promising mostly thanks to its ability to attract worldwide top talent in the field of augmented reality (many of them regular contributors to this blog – games alfresco):
Dr. Leonard Kleinrock (Professor, University of California at Los Angeles), Blair McIntyre (Professor, Georgia Tech), Mark Billinghurst (Professor, University of Canterbury), Daniel Wagner (Professor, University of Graz, Vienna), Dr. Michael Gervautz (CEO Imagination, Vienna)

Now, what would you do with $5M and that kind of caliber to advance augmented reality games?

***Update***

A couple of months later Media Power made another major investment. This time the sum was $2.7M and the benefactor –  Mark Billinghurst’s HIT Lab in New Zealand.

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Top 10 Augmented Reality engines that will ignite a new era of video games

Posted on May 13, 2008 by Ori Inbar

Welcome back!

So far we have looked at demos of augmented reality gameplay and investigated preferred hardware devices. That was just the warm up. Now we’re getting into the real beef: who offers the best software engine that can augment our reality (and our spirits)? Who will spearhead the creation of a totally new gaming experience?

Games alfresco brings you the unofficial roundup of the top 10 best augmented reality engines.

We will look at one engine at a time (enough with these looong posts!) and at the end of the round up, will rank them based on the feedback from you, the community. This is collaborative work in progress of group of passionate contributors on facebook. If you want to take part of the fun, join us at: augmented reality games.

Here is a sneak peak at some of the engines that we may or may not review:

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Stay tuned…or better yet – tell us what you think!

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