Games Alfresco

Mattel Launches Augmented Toys at Comic Con

Posted on July 23, 2009 by rouli

Barbie maker Mattel, and augmented reality provider Total Immersion, have joined forces to bring the public the first retail toys that are AR enhanced (or so says their press release). Unveiled today at Comic-Con 2009, each product in Mattel’s line of action figures and vehicles based on James Cameron coming film Avatar will come with a –

3-D web tag, called an i-TAG, which consumers can “scan” using a home computer’s webcam. Scanning the i-TAG will reveal special content onscreen unique to the corresponding product. Exact content varies for each item, but could include biographical information, additional images and animated models of the figures. When the i-TAG for deluxe figures, vehicles or creatures are placed under a webcam, animated 3-D models will “come alive” through engaging, evading or defending moves. Place two i-TAGs from the “Battle Pack” together and the 3-D images will interact with each other.

3d web tag? Sounds impressive, but thanks to this next video clip, we can all see it’s nothing more than a marker card:

Still, it looks cool and I’m quite sure it’s gonna be a hit this Christmas season (unless the film itself bombs). Pity they used such a convoluted term for it.

press release, via I4U news.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Tagged: Games, indoors AR, total immersion, web camera | 2 Comments »

AR Lite with SREngine Lite

Posted on July 21, 2009 by rouli

This writer’s favorite AR developer, Sein Kanemura, has just posted an English description of his latest mobile application SREngine Lite. Unlike the full blown SREngine, this one does not try to augment a video feed, but rather tackles the simpler task of mobile image recognition. It similar to Nokia’s Point and Find and some other mobile applications, but I find its interface very attractive:

The Lite version makes do without a server (up to 20 images can be stored on the device), doesn’t require GPS or compass readings, so it works on the iPhone 3G as well as on the iPhone 3GS, and it’s purely based on image recognition.

SREngine Lite recently won the Japanese “Next-Generation Communications & Marketing” award under the Future category. And, following the trend, Kanemura promises to “release SREngine Lite SDK for iPhone which allows developers to design own ar app.”.

More details here. Tom covered SREngine Lite a couple of week ago, but I’ve waited for the English translation, mistrusting Google Translate.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Tagged: Handhelds and Cellphones, Markerless, Point and Find, SREngine | 2 Comments »

Cool Augmented Business Card from Toxin Labs

Posted on July 20, 2009 by rouli

While the whole web is gushing over James Alliban‘s augmented business card, I find the next implementation even more exciting. Don’t get me wrong, Alliban’s card is cool, but this one is a bit more useful:

It was created by Jonas Jäger, and more importantly, he doesn’t plan to keep the technology to himself. Jäger plans to release a front-end application that will let you create your own “presentation” that will be displayed when your business card is flashed in front of a web camera. It uses a QR code to identify your card from others, and an AR marker to have FLARToolKit something to get a fix on. All in all, it answers Thomas Carpenter’s call to create a service for these kind of augmented business cards, and really looks good.

(Augmented Business Card at Toxin Labs)

Filed under: Uncategorized | Tagged: artoolkit, indoors AR, QR codes, Visible Markers, web camera | 5 Comments »

Weekly Linkfest

Posted on July 19, 2009 by rouli

This passing week’s trending augmented reality topics were AcrossAir’s Tube Locator (which is two weeks old) and James Alliban’s augmented business card (which is over a month old, can’t see why it became so popular suddenly). Let’s hope next week will bring some fresh AR news. As a matter of fact, tomorrow I’ll cover an even cooler augmented business card concept. In the meanwhile, here’s this week’s linkfest:

Another week, another TalkBlogRadio interview with an AR alumni, this time it’s Maarten Lens-FitzGerald of SPRXMobile speaking with Tracy Swedlow about future directions for Layar and the industry as a whole.
Even better than the real thing: the Guardian had a good report on the current state of augmented reality.
On the other hand, Wired mocks the current plethora of augmented reality apps with its own proposal for an an AR hobo app – “Augmented Reality Hobo Signs? There’s an App for That“.
The Cartoon Network is using an AR game to promote their IncrediKids show (via Revolution Magazine).
Not only AR was used to promote the last Star Trek movie, the DVD version will have its own (?) AR experience.
Techcrunch: Canon uses AR to enhance product design process. Interesting video that also shows how that dinosaur we mentioned on last week’s linkfest works (answer: with a lot of markers).
Augmented reality is cool! But where’s the ROI?

Weekly quote:

However, I am nervous about the potential AR hype bubble. I’m pushing
“real AR” (which right now means tabletop) and the importance of tight
registration whenever I talk to the press or companies, because I want
as many people to realize that whether these apps succeed or fail
should not really be used as a metric of the potential success or
failure of AR.

Blair MacIntyre from an interesting discussion on the AR Forum whether the recent set of GPS based applications are AR or not (a point I’ve briefly touched here. I much prefer those pseudo AR application over the novelty AR applications).

This week’s video comes to us from Dutch design company Strafwerk. They described this video as “welcome to the future”, but I think it’s actually worse than Zugara‘s clothes shopping application (which wasn’t that great on itself):

Filed under: Uncategorized | Tagged: Canon, linkfest, SPRXMobile | 1 Comment »

Has Augmented Reality Arrived to the iPhone ?

Posted on July 14, 2009 by Ori Inbar

Fellow augmented reality enthusiasts!

Checkout the news in the iPhone 3.1 Beta 2 SDK (you need to login.)

It may treasure what we’ve all been waiting for. The elusive API. The holy access to live video on the iPhone.

We will never know if the Open Letter to Apple had any dent on Apple’s decision to introduce the new APIs – but for a moment – we are blissful.

By tomorrow we’ll know for sure if it works. What ever the outcome, at least we made a lot of friends and discovered a swarm of AR developers eager to bring the augmented reality experience to the masses.

Thank you all for the overwhelming response!

And let me challenge you:

The first to confirm the above theory will be indicted to

Games Alfresco’s Hall of Fame.

Thanks Mike for the tip!

Filed under: Uncategorized | Tagged: AR Devices, AR Tools, iphone | 9 Comments »

Mobilizy Responds

Posted on July 13, 2009 by rouli

I have been warmongering last week, with a couple of posts that mainly target Mobilizy of Wikitude fame (“Battle of the AR Browsers” and “Updates from the Front Line“). Mark A.M. Kramer of Mobilizy left the following response to my last post:

Dear Rouli,

Thank you for the round-up of what has happened in the AR world this week. A lot has happened as you are well aware.

First of all, we at Mobilizy do not see ourselves in an AR war. We are just tired of all the attention given to SPRXMobile and Layar when we are well aware that most users of Layar are only in the Netherlands and the whole world is giving its attention to Layar as if it was the first AR application/browser in the world. WIkitude is global and we have over 130,000+ users around the world.

Also, we have worked with SPRXMobile in the past and they are well aware of the outcomes of that working relationship. We are coders, developers, AR techies. WE love crafting software that is useful and makes people happy. One of the many strengths of SPRXMobile and Layar is marketing. In reality, we would make an amazing strategic alliance together with our combined strengths.

With regards to Acrossair: We have respect for their new application even if we did say we thought the demonstration was a mock-up. It still is hard to tell really. We do know that the camera api is not officially open for development on the iPhone from other applications (we are developing onthe iPhone too!) This means that Acrossair is using a hack to accomplish what they have done. Hopefully Apple will change its mind and open the api up for develoment.

This is what we wrote about Acrossair:
@Kjeld @oheckmann The people at acrossair made a wonderful MOCK- Video: http://bit.ly/Vd37Y you can tell it is fake if you look closely.

This is a mock-up of our iPhone prototyping. We have the compass and GPS functioning, no camera API yet! http://twitpic.com/9o7or

We are excited that the field of mobile AR is taking off! We are happy to work with anyone and everyone to advance this nascent field.

Cheers,

Mark of Mobilizy / WIkitude

Filed under: Uncategorized | Tagged: Mobilizy, Wikitude | 2 Comments »

Weekly Linkfest

Posted on July 12, 2009 by rouli

And yet another week ends, full with exciting AR news. Some news items were put aside in order to make place to more urgent reports. Luckily, the weekly linkfest is here to mend things up.

Short piece in the NY Times, “Kicking Reality Up a Notch“. (AR Balloon?).
Noora Guldemond of Metaio gave an interview to TacticalTransparency at blogtalkradio. Since she mentions Games Alfresco but fails to mention Augmented Times, from now on I will only cover Total Immersion (till the end of this post).
Speaking of Total Immersion
- French McDonald’s Happy Meal AR experience.
- The Phonehouse (French mobile phones retailer) AR experience.
Canon launches augmented reality dinosaur experience in Japan: “Visitors will be allowed to don a pair of virtual reality glasses that will display nearly life-sized three-dimensional images of various dinosaurs right there on the museum floor”
Coraline’s 3d garden is an augmented reality application celebrating the DVD release of Coraline. Here’s some UGO guys playing with it. It was created by some German company that may or may not be related to the first bullet.
Lockheed Martin wins DARPA’s AR specs contract.
An augmented poster for the new Gamer action film.

This week’s video is of a little application you might have heard about, called tweet TwittAround.
It enables you to see tweets overlaid on top of the video input coming from your iPhone 3GS. Tweets are rendered according to the location they are coming from. Interestingly, this project comes from the same guy, Michael Zoellner, that is behind some other cool AR applications.

Have a nice week!

Filed under: Uncategorized | Tagged: Canon, linkfest, Metaio, total immersion | 1 Comment »

When an Augmented Reality Experience Goes From Viral to Pandemic

Posted on July 11, 2009 by Ori Inbar

A new campaign for Weet-Bix , launched On July 6th centered around a series of “3D cards”.

Photo credit NBR

When 10 of the series of 43 cards are held up to a web-cam, they trigger a three-dimensional image of the relevant All Black to appear onscreen (see photo above). Fans can rotate the card held in front of the web cam, and the onscreen figure rotates in full-perspective.

This now common augmented reality experience was developed by Total Immersion (creator of the Topps AR game), and Australian company Dreamscape.

The typical reaction you expect from such campaigns (many of which were produced in the past year) is – jaws dropping.

Not this time.

Ben Geek vividly describes the experience as a modern via Dolorosa. Hilarious. From an intrusive registration process ( “[they] demand, my name, my email address and my date of birth? Why exactly?”), to a draconian installation process (“have I broken the computer?”) – it left a strong bad taste among its users.

When Sanitarium, the Cereal company behind the promotion, dumped traditional media outlets such as TV and print in favor of this “futuristic” campaign, they didn’t expect this dystopian backlash. Apparently they reacted quickly and are redesigning the Weet-Bix promotion “after accepting that children might find their hi-tech features hard to digest.”

As Mark Billinghurst pontificates:

there’s a lesson there about how having great AR technology doesn’t guaranteed a successful marketing campaign if you provide a bad experience.

Thanks Mark Billinghurst for the tip

Filed under: Uncategorized | 2 Comments »

Updates from the Frontline

Posted on July 11, 2009 by rouli

Continuing my coverage of the augmented reality browser wars, here are the latest news (well, some of them are a few days old, excuse me for procrastinating a bit):

AcrossAir is not satisfied with letting you find the closest subway station in London (where it’s called The Tube), it also has its sights on the NY subway system:

If you remember correctly, Mobilizy, makers of Wikitude, claimed AcrossAir’s application demo is nothing but a mock-up. Seems real to me.
Anyway, Mobilizy is working hard to remind people that Wikitude augmented the world way before SPRXMobile’s Layar. Moreover, one of their tweets suggests that Layar was based on Wikitude’s technology. Indeed, SPRXMobile did cooperate with Mobilizy once, when creating their ATM finder, but it doesn’t prove that Layar is Wikitude in disguise.
Mobilizy also released this video demoing their Wikitude API, and did not miss the opportunity to include some sarcastic remark towards its end: