• Got half a hour? See this fine documentary about AR from Bloomberg.com.
• While I’m writing posts, Ori scores some VC bucks – Ogmento raised $3.5M and is now looking to recruit new employees.
• YDreams and 3d scene analysis chip maker Canesta team together to develop AR application. I’ve high expectations from those two. They could make a better augmented air guitar, for example.
• Late last year I’ve predicted that 2010 will see the publication of an augmented Playboy edition. This concept video shows what it might look like (safe for work).
• Space InvadAR is supposedly the first vision based AR game. It’s not, and some would argue it’s not a game at all (no way to win), but it’s a good start for maker Zenitum.

This week’s video is a video presentation for QderoPateo’s Ouidoo, the articulated naturality device. I don’t know if it’s official, but seeing this video I understand why the avoid using the term augmented reality. A much better term is surrealism:

Have a great week, see you in ARE2010!

1. Battle of the AR Browsers

Wikitude, Layar, Tonchidot, Junaio, TagWhat and others hope to be the standard for the AR browser market.  Layar has recently upped the ante with an AR content store and TagWhat takes it in a new direction by combining lessons learned with Foursquare and Twitter.  I suspect one of the big boys like Google, Twitter or Facebook will eventually either create their own or co-opt the ideas from these early browsers into their current products.  I’m not sure which horse to bet on in this race, but in the end we customers are the winners.

2. DIY Portable Augmented Reality Headset

Using an Eye-Trek video headset, the guy at Tailormadetoys made a pair of AR glasses.  I love the DIY culture and while they’re not see-through, I think all the right parts to make one are out there.  This post from Team Hack-a-Day proves that the DIY makers are getting close, so why can’t one of the big makers get it done?

3. The AR phone – Ouidoo

The specs on this Ouidoo QderoPateo smartphone are in the WTF!? zone.  While the phone won’t be out until the fall, the company claims it’ll have a 26-core CPU capable of 8-gigaflop floating point operations and include  512MB RAM, 4GB ROM, 28GB of built-in storage, microSD expansion, Bluetooth, WiFi, GPS, built-in 3D map, accelerometer, digital compass, 5-megapixel camera with flash, 220 hours of standby battery life, and a sharp 3.5-inch 800 x 480 screen.  Whew.

While I’m not completely believing the hype, and it could end up being vaporware, it certainly looks promising.  Though it’ll have to work hard to compete with the likes of the iPhone and Droid.

4. Eyeborg

Bionic eyes and augmented reality.  It’s like peanut better and chocolate!  Rob Spence is putting a camera into his eye to make movies with (and because its just plain cool.)  And he’s also interested in combining augmented reality with his eye camera.  They’ve come up with a promotional AR eyeborg t-shirt in the meantime.

Eyeborg’s New AR shirt in action!

5. ARE2010

Bruce Sterling, Will Wright, Marco Tempest, and the list goes on.  It pains me to say that I won’t be able to make the inaugural event.  I had a work conflict with that week, so I have to bow out of hosting the panel on AR glasses.  But for the rest of you, I hope you’ll be able to make it.  With AR on the rise and viable business options a-plenty, it’s a good time to network and see what everyone is doing with the nascent technology.  This is the “can’t miss” AR event of the year.

6. ARWave

Our favorite interviewer Tish Shute and longtime commenter Thomas Wrobel have been sheparding the AR Wave project and collaborating with people all over the globe.  While it’s still too early to tell, this could end up being one of the most important AR developments out there if they can truly create an open source way of using AR.  As they’ve been telling everyone, they’re trying to make a system that:

* Anyone can make content

* Anyone can make a browser

* Anyone can run a server

7. iPhone OS4.0

It almost pains me to get excited about an iPhone update that promises video access to make real AR work on that smartphone.  We got fooled last September with the OS3.1.  I’m hoping we don’t get fooled again (unless you’re the Who.)

8. Haptic AR floors

I’m not even entirely sure if haptic floors fit into the augmented reality spectrum, but it’s so crazy weird and true, that I had to include it.  I seriously doubt we’ll be seeing a commercial product anytime soon though (or ever.)

9. AR Drone

While the news on the AR drone is a stale few months old, I still think it warrants inclusion because it was a great product.  The hovercraft alone was worth the price of admission, but the AR added a creative twist to it.  I have no idea if it sold well, but it sure did capture the imaginations of a lot of geeks.

10. You choose!

Let us know what you think is the coolest thing going in augmented reality right now.  Whether it’s a product only hinted at or one currently residing on your smartphone, we’d like to hear it.  So let us know here at Games Alfresco in the comment section!

• Toby has a great wrapup of the European AR business conference.
• And here’s Gabriel Shalom of Augmentology talking about Aura Recognition at the ARB conf.
• The specs of QderoPateo Ouidoo, the “articulated naturality” phone, are out. Sergey Ten gives his analysis.
• Blair MacIntyre ponders whether cheating will be prevalent with augmented reality games.
• Junaio for Android to support natural feature tracking, dinosaurs.
• Make your own HUD.

This week’s video is of a kid playing air AR guitar, a promotion to some Disney product, I think. On the bright side, it’s the first time I see augmentation of the torso (and not the head). Via Development Memo For Ourselves

Have a great week!

And now, for the links:

• Whimsical infographics on GigaOM portraying mobile AR application that are going to change the world.
• ReadWriteWeb asks whether AR should be open or closed, and the answer is not that clear when comparing Layar and acrossair, each advocating a different practice.
• Did you know that Yahoo filed a patent on geo-located social AR? How Apple of them.
• Augmented Planet writes about best practices in augmented reality browsers
• CNBC interviews the guys from QderoPateo we mentioned last week – they aim to build a custom AR device and software, would be interesting to see how successful they’ll be.
• Layar is on Europe’s top 100 startups, according to Techcrunch.
• A Czech AR ad for Peugeot 5008. Yeah, I mention it just in order to put a link to that old post of mine.

There were a couple of other interesting things happening this week, don’t you worry, I’ll have a dedicated post about them in the very near future. In the meantime, this week’s video comes to us via @chrisgrayson. It’s very cool, but unfortunately, I don’t understand how it was done. Yes, ARToolKit was involved, but how was the robot augmented to fire rockets? What provided the distance readings? If any of you read Japanese and can shed light on those question – please do so in the comments:

Have a great week!

• QderoPateo are developing an AR dedicated device. GigaOM asks why (‘hich is a good reason to plug my “The Kindle Test” post)
• Augmented Planet was bountiful this week with “The case against augmented reality” that tries hard, but fails to find bad use-cases unique to AR; Their “Ultimate guide to iPhone augmented reality” is a very thorough review of, well, iPhone AR applications; And, I forgot to mention it last week, but they’ve launched Augmented Reality News, which aggregates many AR blogs into one stream.
• VentureBeat queries Metaio and Layar about the next generation of AR applications.
• On the other hand, Blake Callens at OneZeroThrice complains about the current state of augmented reality – “Can I have GOOD Mobile Augmented Reality Yet?”
• BoingBoing featured a very strange artsy video about augmented dating.
• Having problems getting your kids dressed in the morning? Brights&Stripes created a magic tee to help out.
• And if you have a couple of hours to burn, ComputerWorld has a long, long review of AR.

And this week’s video is the perfect example of AR being misused. A couple of young Dutch guys calling themselves “Teletekst Is Dood” (teletext is dead) assisted by the Layar browser have terrorized non-suspecting citizens (and their neighbors) whose only fault was to tweet about banal things. Yeah, I guess you can call it art:

[Vimeo=8946012]

Have a nice week (but be careful about who is reading your boring tweets)!