Weekly Linkfest

Posted on August 9, 2009 by rouli

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:

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: , , , , , | 5 Comments »

AR Strippers, Oh My!

Posted on August 4, 2009 by rouli

Well, you knew this day will come sooner or later. As any other media before it, porn was destined to reach augmented reality. But I bet you could never guess that the first semi-erotic application will be created to promote a movie.
Apparently, Gamer‘s last attempt at augmented reality advertisement didn’t bring the masses, so they launched this site. All for the better I guess.

The application lets you select between four exotic dancers, and about five dances for each dancer. I would have written about it earlier, but being a thorough journalist as I am, I had to test all the available options.
[via akihabaranews.com

Filed under: Uncategorized | Tagged: , , | 4 Comments »

Weekly Linkfest

Posted on August 2, 2009 by rouli

Here are just some of the things that happened this week in the realm of Augmented Reality, which I didn’t have the time to write a whole post about. It’s going to be a long post, you may want to prepare a snack before you go ahead.

This week’s video comes from Metaio, which launched an ambitious initiative named “metaio World“. There haven’t given much information about it, but here’s a short quote –

You can view, create, upload, modify, navigate, share, rate or play games with real 3D content anywhere in the real world. Add your 3D and post interactive elements, your favourite photos, twitter messages or anything you can imagine.

An ambitious project deserves an ambitious video, but can they deliver?

Have a nice week!

Filed under: Uncategorized | Tagged: , , , , | 4 Comments »

Augmented Reality Won’t Make your App Cooler

Posted on August 1, 2009 by rouli

Augmented Traffic Views is a pretty cool app that links your Android phone to Toronto’s traffic cameras to help you make better decisions for your daily commute. Alas, I don’t understand what the augmented reality part contributes to the application.
As a matter of fact, it seems to only hurt usability. Would you rather physically turn around yourself every time you want to see the video input coming from some traffic camera, or would you prefer a scrollable list of cameras and their locations? I would go with the second option. Moreover, you can’t really use it in AR mode while driving, unless I’m mistaken and you can do u-turns in the middle of the road in Canada.

Once again, it’s a useful application, and they have done a right choice giving it text to speech capabilities, but having an augmented reality interface seems to me contrived. True, AR has a natural appeal when it comes to house listing, as can be seen by the end of the video, but then again, house listing is not really about traffic views. I hope the guys behind this app (who are you?) will reconsider their use-cases before releasing it to the Android’s app store.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Tagged: , , | Leave a comment »

Augmented DJ by Wrigley

Posted on July 31, 2009 by rouli

The good guys from UK based creative agency Exposure and the Australian AR wizards from Boffswana show us that using augmented reality in a campaign, doesn’t necessarily means having a “look at the novelty” brain dead application (unlike, say, the Always one).
For the coming launch of Wrigley’s 5 brand of gums in France, they have created an application that lets users mix together club-music via AR markers. There are three markers representing gum flavors, each linked to a certain track, and one master marker to rule them all. The markers’ distance from the master marker and their relative angles determine the volume and effects for each track.

Once you have become experienced in the ways of the augmented DJ, you can record your own mix, upload it to the site’s gallery, and even embed it in your blog. Now, since I’m tone-deaf, and my laptop is not strong enough to register four markers at once, I’m going to embed a creation by some other guy (sorry Games Alfresco and RSS readers, no embedding for you):

Now, I’m well aware that the idea of an augmented reality DJ set is not a new one. As a matter of fact, just a few weeks ago we’ve learned about the ARDJ art project. And this application is not perfect, as it requires a good computer and setting to work, and the embedding issue could be solved if videos were hosted on Youtube. Nevertheless, we should recommend Exposure and Boffswana for not going with the easy solution, and creating a very interactive experience (only Living Sasquatch is in this league, also done by Boffswana). Now, lets see more campaigns of this kind instead of the other “novelty” kind.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Tagged: , , , | 4 Comments »

Augmented Reality, Now with Wings

Posted on July 29, 2009 by rouli

Proctor & Gamble has launched a new AR campaign to promote some kind of Always “Infinity Pads”.

Since I’ve offended to many people in the last few weeks I’ll keep mum this time. However, the kind people at AgencySpy, who are also responsible for uploading the above video to Youtube, had this to say:

This campaign is complete crap. …
P&G pitched the AR piece to you ladies as magic, which of course it isn’t. This is the kind of advertising that reiterates how ineffective “look at me” work truly is. It’s also annoying and dilutes the power of this new tool for those who have salient ideas for how to use it.

Even more amazing is that this is not even the first AR campaign for feminine product to have an AR ad. Kotex (in Turkey) had one a few months ago.

via AgencySpy where you can also read the ridiculous press release by Proctor & Gamble.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Tagged: , , , | 1 Comment »

Nerds Augment Themselves to become Optimus Prime

Posted on July 28, 2009 by rouli

For some reason, one of my most successful posts, was the one about Total Immersion’s promotion for Transformers 2, where everyone had the chance to virtually try an Optimus Prime mask.
Now, a bunch of nerds (no other word to describe them, sorry), have taken their Transformers fandom to a whole new level. If you are a pregnant woman, younger than 15 or suffer from heart arrhythmia, please don’t push the play button. You see, AR entering the mainstream is not always a good thing:

Filed under: Uncategorized | Tagged: , , | 6 Comments »

Bokode – Amazing New Type of Barcode

Posted on July 27, 2009 by rouli

I find the next piece of research so amazingly cool that I can’t understand how I’ve missed for so long (a whole three days!). Submitted to next month’s SIGGRAPH, MIT’s Media Lab Bokode is a new way to visually code information.
I’m not going to try to explain the technology behind it (that’s what the paper for), but it a nutshell it uses a small light source to create an image consisting of thousands of pixels. The pixels are only discernible when a camera is looking at the Bokode while its focus is set to infinity. I hope the next video explains it better:

As the video above shows, there are very nice implications to augmented reality. Aside from coding the identity of the object, it can also encode how’s the object positioned in comparison to your camera. Though, if I understood correctly, the demonstration above uses two cameras, one shooting the object in focus, while the other looks at the Bokode.
Another obstacle in the way of wide adoption is that the Bokode currently requires an energy source to operate. Nevertheless, it has already taken a step in the right direction, and currently have a short page on Wikipedia.
More information here and here. Via Augmented.org.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Tagged: , , , | 4 Comments »

Weekly Linkfest

Posted on July 26, 2009 by rouli

Another lazy summer week has passed by (unless you live below the equator), bringing us some more augmented reality news:

This week’s video comes to us from Italian Giancarlo Facoetti, who used ARToolKit to create a simple game, that actually looks like some harmless fun:

Have a nice week!

Filed under: Uncategorized | Tagged: , , , , | 3 Comments »

ARound: You know, for Nokia users

Posted on July 23, 2009 by rouli

[A short apology. A few days ago, in a bout of paranoia, I wrote a short post suspecting that Sequence Point’s ARound may be some kind of malware. I jumped to conclusions due to some intriguing aspects in Sequence Point’s site. I should have contacted the developers before posting, but regretfully I did not. After David Caabeiro of Sequence Point contacted me, I quickly pulled the post, understanding my mistake. Here’s setting the record straight]

Got a Nokia N97 phone and envy all those cool guys with their slick iPhones or Android phones with their cool augmented reality applications? Yearn for the days when Nokia was a leader in mobile AR? Spanish company Sequence Point Software might have the solution for your desires.
Called ARound, this is the Symbian equivalent of Wikitude and Layar. Using GPS and compass readings (though future versions may include object recognition), ARound overlays the video input with points of interest gathered from 3rd party data sources, and provides details on close by landmarks.

Designed to be pluggable, ARound may interest developers as well. David Caabeiro of Sequence Point writes:

Our idea is allowing 3rd party developers to add value at different
levels of the application in a simple way: We realize Symbian is not
the easiest platform to play around so this hopefully makes things
easier for developers interested to include Symbian in their
offerings. The first plugins to be made available for developers will
be the so called “data sources”, which will allow them to integrate
any content (from mashups, etc) into the application. Later some other
plugin details will be made available, allowing further customization
and integration into existing applications. For example, one of the
first goals is adding OpenGL support for those interested in doing
more advanced rendering.

Best of all, a beta version can be downloaded freely, so if you are a N97 owner, go check it out, and share your impression in the comment section.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Tagged: , , , , | 1 Comment »

« Previous Page — Next Page »