Games Alfresco

On a rainy Saturday morning, the Canal strip is already busy. Just a block away, a group of passionate (how else would you explain the Sat morning meetup) techies are hauling up  the elevator to Topp’s Penthouse – The Open Planning Project. The coolest work place I have ever seen.

About 20 people are in the room + 10 on Skype (from Europe and the US)
In the spirit of unconference – all the rules are broken in the first 5 minutes…the day is kicked off with a session about PyGo Wave and a discussion about using Google wave (XMPP protocol) for distributed Augmented Reality.

Welcome to the NYC AR Dev Camp. In a few hours a parallel session will start on the left coast in Mountain View.

Next is introductions of the passionistas on location:

Sophia Parafina – Open GEO (and the organizer of the event – thanks!)

Tish Shute – UgoTrade blog + Using Google Wave for distributed AR on the internet
Omer Gunes From NYU MLP –
Steven Feiner –  Columbia Professor for the AR lab
Don Schwartz – Demystifying tech, virtual worlds
Name – Local search, social search
Kate Chapman – web developer FortiusOne
Dimitri Darras – web dev
Ohan Oda – PHd from Columbia – Goblin XNA
Sean White – Columbia, Smithsonian institution
Ori Inbar – Games alfresco author, Founder of Ogmento – maker of AR games.
Dan Leslie – web consulting reflections delta: will launch a loc based social graph analysis tool (iPhone)
MZ – startup to develop a platform to use semantic data to enable virtual worlds
Jon Russek – film production + law + internet. Interested in AR as artistic medium for creativity
Bert Picot – entrepreneur – live entertainment ticketing. learn about AR
Steven Henderson – Columbia – AR for procedural applications
Matthew Pierce – a writer – interested in user experience

Davide Byron – developed the game Spads and Fokkers and code
Chris Grayson – Web developer and marketing consultant
Marco Neumann – KONA
Noah Zerkin – The inventor of the Zerkin glove

Who have I missed?

What shall we talk about?

Sean White volunteers to moderate the discussion, and collcts these topics on the board:
-egalitarian usage – relevance of AR to small businesses
-limitations of mobile devices (handsets) – how to overcome limitations in the near-mid term
-open marker system (database) to be implemented for global use (what role RFID might play?)
-what about voice recognition as input – multimodal (ARXML voice protocol?)
-computer infrastructure for sensor fusion (current apps only use limited sets of sensors) blue tooth?
-create a sound map based on a picture?
(Sean mentions an iphone app for hearing impaired)
-revenue models ?
-use AR for advertising, enhancing existing tech and business models
-Big NY game (location based, social, AR game built for NYC by New Yorkers!)
-where does AR meet traditional motion tracking?
-natural feature tracking
-intersection of AR and semantic web – using AR as basis for formal models on the web
-patent land mines? (GEOVector)

Lots of great topics. Sean proposes to group them into 4 categories and have a vote:

1) Business

2) Standards

3) Tech

4) Apps and games

Surprisingly, business and Apps get the most votes!

Now we are off to a lunch break (Denno Coil playing on the screen). Will continue after the break.

To get a sense how cool this location is – checkout this video (courtesy of Sean White)

Ohan Oda presents “his baby” from Columbia university: Goblin XNA a development tool for AR games based on the Microsoft XNA game development environment. See more info.

Questions range the gamut from -” what does it run on?” (anything as long as it’s a Microsoft platform…) to “how much can it be customized?” (practically anything – it’s open source!)

Filed under: AR Events | Tagged: AR Dev Camp, augmented reality, New York, Topp |