• Augmented Reality
• Giant Robots
• Yahoo Japan

Yes, it seems that the Japanese branch of Yahoo is much cooler than its American counter part. They have recently announced the coming release of a free iPhone application set to display a virual Zaku II mecha from the animated series Gundam (and sorry if I get this wrong, I’ve never seen it).
Interestingly enough the application is both image-recognition based and GPS/compass based. It will show the mecha when the iPhone camera will be directed at the (real) 18-meter tall Gundam statue in Shizuoka, Japan, and when the camera is pointed at a special marker.

For more details check out Anime News Network. Via Development Memo for Ourselves.

Yahoo! and augmented reality leader Total Immersion have come up with some nifty ways to bring consumers into the action at the world’s largest winter sporting event.  Yahoo!’s “Fancouver” exhibit enables passers-by to insert themselves into the festivities in a host of guises.   Kicking off yesterday, Feb. 12, Fancouver features an entertaining and versatile digital out-of-home display, with dual windows that use augmented reality (AR) face tracking and tracking to a brochure, respectively, to give fans a distinctly different view of the proceedings.

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!