5 Things To Do With Junaio Glue and LLA Markers

Posted on July 7, 2010 by thomaskcarpenter

With the live video access on the iPhone OS 4.0, Metaio is looking to make a splash with its Glue technology in the Junaio AR browser. They would like to show how the iPhone can do more than GPS AR browsing with both image processing and their indoor LLA marker tracking.

LLA Markers

The LLA markers are designed for indoor spaces when GPS becomes unusable. By attaching the latitude, longitude and altitude to a unique pattern, the iPhone can reposition itself without having access to satellites. Since the compass and gyroscope still work, you can point your phone away from the LLA marker and get navigation to the next POI.

This case shows how AR can be superior to map based location using the LLA marker technology. In underground malls when GPS becomes useless, AR can help bridge the gap. I’ve spent considerable time in Japan and often have been lost once I strolled far from my starting location. I would have to go up to the surface to get my barrings occasionally. If they installed LLA markers, it would allow the iPhone to become a useful navigator.

Junaio Glue

In addition to indoor GPS locations, Metaio has improved AR by adding live optical image processing.  By uploading a tracking image to the Junaio servers, anyone can create an optical image that 3D content and information can be attached.  To check out the technology, download Junaio and view this Glue comic character to see how it works.

This image processing along with a standard browser opens up a wealth of possibilities for Junaio.  Now content providers can be more creative with their applications, utilizing visual clues along with GPS and directional ones.

Here are a few ideas that might spur your interest:

1) Using available 3D content on the web, turn your run-of-the-mill picture book into a 3D pop-up with your iPhone.  Just upload each page as a marker and attach the image to it.

2) Create an augmented menu based on the logo of your restaurant.  Or just have it link to your webpage.  Make the world your Internet.

3) Location based treasure hunts using actual pictures of locations to find the next clue.

4) Turn your face into a business card.

5) Turn your logo into a charity event.  Every time someone checks your logo using Junaio and it pulls the image or link from your server, give them a chance to donate, or make a small donation on their behalf.

If you have other ideas, feel free to comment!

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Gonzo-Reality

Posted on July 6, 2010 by thomaskcarpenter

The story Bruce Sterling posted up last week on his Wired blog blew my mind.  It shouldn’t have really.  But I guess I’ve been considering augmented reality and its commercial uses to be official and sanctioned.  This kind of unofficial gonzo-view of reality could go a long way.

First, if you’re too lazy to click the link and check out the article, the leak in your hometown gang have made an augmented reality view that shows the oil leak on your smartphone when you point it at any BP logo, assuming you have the proper layer pulled up.

Mark Skwarek, one of the creators, sent me an email about the project as I was writing up this post.  Here’s some of the progress they’ve made and other places talking about it.

We were featured on WIRED’s Beyond the Beyond. We have an upcoming show at Famous Accountants in Bushwick NY, Aug 7th through Sept 4th. We are showing it at the Bronx Art Space in NYC. We were featured on Turbulence’s Networked_Performance and will present on it at Upgrade! Chicago in September. We were also featured on Eyebeam’s Reblog. And we are in the upcoming Cyberarts.

This project itself seems simple and is quite ingenious.  But why stop at poking fun at the world’s current kick toy?  Pointing your smartphone at random objects and getting an individual person’s POV visual could be quite mind expanding.

An unofficial game of object-association could make great interactive art, political rhetoric, or dystopic reinforcing world-view; depending on its implementation.  Wouldn’t you like to point your smartphone at everyday objects and find out how your favorite artists or celebrities view the world?  Seeing how YoYo Ma, or the Dalai Lama or Bruce Campbell (the guy from the Evil Dead series) view the world could be liberating.  Or since our own Bruce Sterling is the Prophet of AR, one of the AR browsers could do a “Bruce Layer” and show us what kind of world he sees when he’s looking around.

Maybe if Glenn Beck was your thing, you’d have a Nazi symbol pop-up when you pointed it at an Obama sticker.  Or if you were a former Bush-hater, you could see a Stalin-esque version of the W with your smartphone.   Propaganda could be all encompassing, blotting out all but the sanctioned viewpoints.

I’m absolutely certain I wouldn’t want to see what Lady Gaga has in mind for the world.  Well.  I might take a peak for a few minutes.  Just out of curiosity.  Not like I’m a fan or anything.  Just curious.

And maybe that’s what a gonzo-reality could bring to AR.  Instead of a mirror reflecting all of our beliefs into an ever-increasing sine wave, we might be privy to alternate views to our own.  Maybe even trying out how someone else sees the world.

Maybe.

Or maybe we couldn’t handle their viewpoint.  The overstimulating rush would make our realities spin around us until we puked it back out, losing all those alternate nutrients our world views could have used to grow.

Oh well.

It’s a nice little project, anyway.

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Weekly Linkfest

Posted on July 4, 2010 by rouli

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

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!

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The Augmented Reality Ballet

Posted on June 30, 2010 by thomaskcarpenter

The Ballet Font Project combines ballet with augmented reality.  I assume they’ll have big screens showing the combined real time dance with the foot drawn fonts.  The project is a rare cross breed between geekdom and high-end culture.

Used watch batteries and infrared LEDs to create a 2D motion tracking system. We taped these little devices to ballet dancers and had then perform moves which formed letters, which will be used in a headline font called “Ligne”.

This video shows a few letters being performed where we’ve used to the tracking data to overlay FX. The stroke width is controlled by the speed of movement. We’ll be doing a live demonstration at the Armory in Portland, Oregon on Thursday, July 1, 2010. Participants will be able to use the tracking devices to do real time augmented reality.

This project is the brainchild of Weiden + Kennedy’s WK12. Oregon Ballet Theatre contributed the choreography and dancing talent. I developed three versions of software called “Chireo” (chirography + choreography). “capture” did the initial motion and video capture. “augment” let us clean up the data and export the font and rendered videos. “live” is the real time motion tracking / augmented reality software we’ll be using at the demo. Todd Greco here at Fashionbuddha helped on the visual FX in the “augment” and “live” versions.

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Robots Need Augmented Reality Too

Posted on June 30, 2010 by thomaskcarpenter

The object recognition portion of augmented reality is a little like that hand-held label printer that you got when you were a kid and then went crazy putting tags on everything in your room.  Did you really need to put a tag on your table that said, “Table”?  Nah.  But it felt good doing it.

High-end object recognition (and I’m including facial) is really a key component to ubiquitous AR.  Well, and those pesky glasses, but we won’t talk about them today.

So back to object recognition.  For our computers to understand the world enough to create seamless reality interfaces, they’re going to have to understand what a chair is, where it is when they see it and what it’s used for.  This understanding will be useful for us humans, but it will be even more useful for robotics in the future.

With easy access to information, labeled in a computer friendly way, robots can learn to use our environment better than before.  And I’m not even talking about high-end robotics either.  A couple of cameras on a Roomba could help it know when to vacuum the floor and when to stay put because a party is going on.  We use unattended vehicles to transfer parts around our Toyota plants.  Allowing these simple vehicles to know when a box has been left in the way and to quietly move around would make them work better.

And who knows, maybe in the far-flung future when Turing level robots become possible, they’ll educate themselves on the wider world by taking long journeys and absorbing the trash-tags left by their human overlords.

And for fun, here’s a picture and video of a robot.

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Augmented Reality Farmville

Posted on June 29, 2010 by rouli

Addicted to Farmville? Have a green thumb but no garden? Envy real farmers but got allergies?
The guys from TU Munich have the perfect solution for you:

Augmented Farmville could be one heck of a layer for Layar/Junaio/Wikitude once better positioning is available. Think of the gold rush to get a virtual plot in major cities, imagine Times Square as a flower bed! Using real meteorological data to those virtual farms would add another interesting and educational twist. It may be the most stupid idea I have ever featured in this blog, but then again, nobody would guess that a farm simulator will be one of the most successful games in 2010.

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How Augmented Reality is Changing the World Cup

Posted on June 27, 2010 by rouli

Coming back from my vacation, I had to catch up with a lot of AR related news. One topic though was so prevalent that I had to write about it in my coming back post. Obviously, I’m talking about the world cup in soccer. No other sports event gained such an attention from the AR community, and here are the results (don’t worry the last few ones are quite good):

Zakumi in FLARToolkit
The good: It seems to be created by a single programmer. Cheers for the initiative.
The god-awful bad: The music. I rather hear vuvuzelas than this one hit wonder.

Kappa’s “We Are One”
The good: The music is better than the previous video.
The bad: It’s in Chinese, so it’s hard for me to tell, but I think you need to download an application to play with it. Hello? This is 2010s, not prehistoric 2009!
Where: http://2010.kappa.com.cn/

Sony Ericsson World Cup Game
The good: You get to be a world famous soccer player while hitting soccer balls with your head in this game created by Total Immersion’s partner CherryPicks.
The bad: World famous soccer players are not necessarily handsome.
Where: http://www.sonyericsson.com.hk/fifa-game/

The world cup in a shopping mall
The good: Nice game, showing there are still some innovative things to do with a marker on a piece of paper. Made by another partner of TI – InterAct 3d.
The bad: Couldn’t they have the same application accessible through a webcam?

Junaio’s virtual soccer field overlay
The good: A brave attempt by Metaio to show game statistics for fans in the stadium in an unconventional way.
The bad: You have to be in South Africa to see it, and no videos are available. I’m a bit skeptic.
More info: http://augmentedblog.wordpress.com/2010/06/24/kick-it-like-augmented-reality/ where you can read about another application assisting you to find a good joint to see the next soccer match.

Zugara’s AR game in a banner
The good: Really cool creative, you need to “head in” corner kicks in this AD for AT&T.
The bad: AT&T. And people looking at you from behind while you’re jerking your head around.
Where: http://www.espn.com

KickBall AR
The good: Much better than AR Boomerang, this is the only mobile application on this list.
The bad: Only available for Samsung’s Bada operating system and the fact that Tom already wrote about it.

If I’ve missed anything (surely there’s a Layar layer for the games, no?), please feel free to add a comment.
So how AR is changing the world cup? Well it’s not, but for my first post in nearly three weeks, I had to try a title inspired by the linkbait generator. Anyhow, the usual “Weekly Linkfest” will return next week and as usual be sure to follow me on Twitter.

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Kickball AR App

Posted on June 24, 2010 by thomaskcarpenter

I guess I feel compelled to post this app because of the World Cup.  It’s a cute idea worth a few minutes of play time, but after that, I’m not sure what the appeal would be.  Personally, I’m ready for the next phase of smartphone AR which requires more awareness of objects and the world. Floating augmented objects just isn’t tickling my fancy anymore.

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Digital Bullets: Augmented Reality – Financially Viable Or A Gimmicky Technology Driven Fad?

Posted on June 21, 2010 by thomaskcarpenter

Lavolta asked a number of CEOs the above question: Augmented Reality – Financially viable or gimmicky technology driven fad?  If you’re a long time reader of Games Alfresco, I don’t suppose I’ll need to expound on my views.  But I would like to hear what your thoughts are about the comments made by the various CEOs (about fifteen.)

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TV Trickery with Augmented Reality

Posted on June 21, 2010 by thomaskcarpenter

We’re a long way from fooling the man on the street, but augmented reality may soon play trickery on your TV screens.  This video montage combining scenes from movies like The Running Man and Wag the Dog; and bits of real-time AR from the last few years makes for a convincing argument about the future of this new medium.

I’m partial to such obscuring of reality as it speaks to my science fiction interests.  Whenever I see a video like this is makes me think of one of my favorite authors, Philip K. Dick.  And while this argument is probably twenty years too soon, the ubiquitous use of AR may eventually enchant the populous with its devious wares.  Though you may scoff at such influences, think long and hard about how current technologies and techniques subject the masses to keep the absence of reason as their masters.

But like I said, that argument is twenty-years too soon, or twenty-years too late, if you consider the wealth of propaganda techniques which by and large are more insidious in their use.  Of course, the real danger is not that sophisticated techniques will be developed to hide or alter the truth, its that they will know everything about you so that they can tailor their obfuscation to maximum effect.  But I digress.

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