Hacker’s Cafe Celebrates Virtual Tokyo with Augmented Reality Game

Posted on February 3, 2009 by Ori Inbar

Via Hacker’s cafe

Hacker’s Cafe celebrated Virtual Tokyo day with an augmented reality game  dubbed – by the Japanese tradition – Cyber Star Rally Challenge.

Hackers hacked some virtual stars in a city square and let loose a pack of other hackers riding hacked MTBs, armed with GPS’, Google 3D view and a (hacked) augmented reality software.

They were tasked with one mission only: collect as many stars as possible.

You have to see it to believe it:

How did it work?

Your guess is as good as mine.

(unless you can read the instructions in Japanese)

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Stimulant XRAY Exposes What’s Under the [Microsoft] Surface

Posted on February 2, 2009 by Ori Inbar

When Microsoft showed SecondLight at PDC 2008 last year, Stimulant was inspired to do something cool with Microsoft’s Surface.

Here is the prototype they built. It takes advantage of Surface’s object recognition capabilities to identify the position of one or more iPhones, and turns those phones into “see through displays” revealing a second layer of information:

Vodpod videos no longer available.

Stimulant is excited by the potential of this as captured in their own words:

…adding a layer of personalized information on top of a public computing experience

SecondLight’s demo was quite inspiring, taking a different angle at this idea: by hovering with tracing paper over an image (think looking glass) it can reveal additional information about a star constellation, or show  street names on an aerial photo.

Now imagine  this capability going beyond “public computing”; imagine having a “magic lens” that allows you to see through anything, or add personalized information to any real life object you look at.

This is one of the stimulating promises of augmented reality. And in this demo, Stimulant made one of the first steps. towards this vision.

Filed under: AR Demos | Tagged: , , , | 1 Comment »

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