Games Alfresco

Another week passed by, and I was especially lazy this week. Sorry, but apart from those augmented strippers from Monday, nothing excited me enough (or annoyed me enough) to write a post about. Which means, we have an extra long linkfest today.

However before we start, I would like to learn a thing or two about our dedicated readers. The next poll asks you to define yourself, and you may select more than one answer. Are you more the creative kind of person, or a problem solver? Please vote, and I’ll post the results on next week’s linkfest:

And now, for the links:

• Tish Shute’s second interview with Robert Rice really makes you think, with some great quotes talking about Neogence and the AR consortium (see below), and a great comment by our regular patron DarkFlame.
• According to Gartner, AR is on its way to the peak of the inflated expectations mountain in their hype cycle model. ReadWriteWeb also takes a look at it, and they link to my strippers post.
• AcrossAir is working on an interesting augmented reality game named Virus Killer 360, but it doesn’t really look like augmented reality, even under my low standards.
• iPhone ARKit is a new open source augmented reality tool kit for the iPhone (very new, not really useful at the moment). Not many details are known and Thomas reports on those that are.
• SPRXMobile envies Twittaround, joins forces with Tweetmondo to show tweets on Layar.
• CNN: “New phone apps seek to ‘augment’ reality” (but what a ‘funny’ title)
  interviews Blair MacIntyre and SPRXMobile.
• Speeking of Blair, he invites you to experiement with AR.
• Boing Boing Gadgets had a day dedicated to augmented reality, featuring a visit to Geisha Tokyo Entertainment, “It’s the end of the non-augmented world as we know it” (the usual rundown of AR videos) and “What do pirates call augmented reality“.
• AR Campaigns of the week:
  • Best buy goes augmented, with BestBuyin3d.com. More on this, tomorrow (credits go to Modern Climate). (via dvice.com)
  • A new site to promote Sony Pictures’ District 9 (credits go to Trigger).
  • The Australian Navy lets you fire torpedos out of an augmented submarine (credits go to Visual Jazz and Boffswana)

The quote of the week comes from Tish Shute’s interview with Robert Rice:

This is part of the problem right now though…no one seems to be thinking about the bigger picture much. All of the effort is either on making the next cool ad campaign for a car or a movie, or creating a tool to tell you where the nearest thingamajig is, but in a really cool fashion on a mobile device.

No one is talking much about filtering data, privilege systems, standards, third party tools, interoperability, and so on. There is also little conversation about where hardware is going. Right now everyone is developing software based on what hardware is available. This needs to change where hardware is being developed to take advantage of new software coming out (this happened in the PC industry a while back and growth accelerated dramatically).

And finally, the next video is of GeoBeagle, an application for Android that adds an augmented reality twist to geo-caching (which is an idea I first encountered here). Interestingly, it uses Wikitude’s API, showing off some of the power of that platform.

Have a nice week!

Filed under: Uncategorized | Tagged: AcrossAir, Geisha Tokyo Entertainment, iPhone ARKit, Layar, linkfest, Neogence |