Weekly Linkfest

Flying drones, electronic musician and virtual girlfriends, all in this week’s linkfest:

For this week’s video we’ve got yet another futuristic vision, this time by German designer Björn Matthes. In his diploma project, Araproject, Matthes adds an energetic urban twist to augmented reality:

Have a beautiful week, happy Eid-ul-Fitr and Rosh Hashanah.

Samsung Galaxy Tab – When AR Becomes a Selling Point, We Won

Does this ad mark the transformation of augmented reality from being a term used by the tech-elite to one used by the commons?

Gravity Jack Indoor Office and SDK

Gravity Jack software firm has created an AR indoor office.  I like the idea of populating an indoor space with augments.  Personally, I wouldn’t use it for work.  I’d rather dork up my writing space at home and show off my favorite LOLcats on the wall next to my computer.  Each to his own, I guess.

Besides giving me an excuse to put a NASDAQ ticker over the latest Inspirational Poster, Gravity Jack is developing an SDK for their indoor system.

Features of the SiREAL World SDK in development now:

IPS – Indoor positioning system, using a patent pending method the phones running our software create a mesh that allows us to position the phone exactly in a Cartesian space indoors. It is almost like walking around with your phone acting like an RFID tag but with coordinates. We also use patented vision techniques to make your phone become the symbol thereby avoiding symbol recognition.

Instant Mapping – Utilizing a combination of scene recognition and real time edge detection we can build the real world scene into a 3d wireframe model on the fly. This allows for actually placing 3d objects in the scene and even behind real world objects because we have depth built into our model. AR products today just overlay things on the same front layer. Our technology allows us to place objects in the actual 3d plain.

GeoLocation and Proximity Alert – Allows a user to receive push notifications when they are near a SiREAL object and for storage of GeoTags for placing objects in the real world.

Asset management server – Our asset management server allows you to upload 3d assets or triggers, symbols associated with those assets and our object recognition will return the correct asset to your application.

Stickyness – While not a technical feature – what we have discovered is that by creating augmented reality applications and an engine that allows for true, non gimmick, life enhancing AR; users keep coming back! AR isn’t just a gimmick with us.

In summary, we fully support existing technology like symbol recognition, GPS tagging, but have new ways for AR to work indoors, in the dark, socially and we can create stickyness in our AR applications. Not only that, our tech understands what it is looking at and gives depth to scenes – something currently done with expensive dual camera setups.

A New Device for Augmented Reality Games Was Born

Finally, the iPod Touch has a camera!

Today, Steve Jobs announced at the Apple Music Event, the new incarnation of the legendary iPod product line.

One of my personal highlights was of course the new iteration of the iPod Touch. Faster (Apple A4 processors – like in the iPhone), with the new Game Center(iOS 4.1), the largest games market (1.5 billion games and apps have been downloaded to the Touch), and now – can do Augmented Reality.

Jobs bragged the iPod games outsells Nintendo DS and PSP games – combined!

There you have it – the perfect new platform for augmented reality games (as long as you have WIFI…)