Before you freak out and demand to know where to order one–it’s a concept video. But watching it makes me feel like a terminator booting up. I just hope they haven’t installed Vista on my OS.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tagged: augmented reality, concept | Leave a comment »
Anybody feels like sponsoring an AR blogger trip to an AR event?
There were plenty of interesting AR links to share this week, but only seven won a place in this week’s linkfest:
This week’s quote comes from that talk with Paige Sez:
As we’ve talked about it before, it’s amazing that marketing and advertising are helping push forward AR, and it’s great. It’s fantastic. But it’s also the worst possible thing that could ever happen because it is such a singular way of looking at an overall ubiquitous computing experience. There are other ways.
And as promised, this week’s video is a demo of LookTel, it looks fantastic, and shows that there are some things that an old Windows phone still does better than a new shiny iPhone (well, at least till June):
Have a great week!
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tagged: Imagination, LookTel, Qualcomm, Seac02 | Leave a comment »
Heavy Rain is an interactive drama video game developed by Quantic Dream for the PlayStation 3. One of the characters in the game, Norman Jayden, uses “Added Reality Glasses” to rapidly investigate crime scenes, analyze evidence, or just waste time. The following videos show examples of the ARI in the game.
Main Trailer (2 minutes)
Wasting Time (2 minutes)
The Augmented Office (4 minutes)
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tagged: AR Games, augmented reality, heavy rain, playstation 3 | 3 Comments »
Okay, probably most of you have read the title and said, so what. World of Warcraft is a game, and definitely not reality. Though don’t tell that to the 11.5 million players worldwide.
These “boss-kill” videos are common for the high-end guilds in WoW. They use the videos as a recruiting tool for good players. If you think WoW is just a marriage killing RPG then you’re wrong. At the bleeding edge of the game, guilds compete to be the first at completing new content – i.e. boss-mobs. These combats are intricate battles of coordination between twenty-five gamers using a host of dedicated UI mods and voice-chat programs to defeat the game. The top guilds are rewarded with sponsorships and top guildleaders translate their leadership into real jobs (a prominant Everquest guild leader got a job with Blizzard because of his exploits.) World of Warcraft is, in otherwords, a competitive sport.
So that’s the context of the video. The important augmented reality aspect comes around the minute and a half mark in the form of six colored discs on the virtual ground. The purpose of the colored discs is to show certain players exactly where to stand in the game. This is akin to wide receivers running correct routes so the quarterback can throw them the ball.
Most likely, a program like this will eventually be banned from use because it will trivialize battles and give guilds that use it an advantage over others. Just like any sport, a level playing field is important to keep top competitors interested.
World of Warcraft’s basis in virtual reality makes inclusion of “augmented” reality easy to pull off. The computer already has a complete knowledge of the world (because it has to draw it) and the screen provides the augmented graphics on the virtual world.
What other sports or competition could benefit from using augmented reality in this form? Could marching band competitions use the local spatial awareness of AR to tighten their formations? Or dance groups? Projection based AR could provide a rapid trainer for coordinating large groups.
But it’s going to be a long time before augmented reality gets banned as an unfair advantage in a sport or competition.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tagged: AR Games, augmented reality, Blizzard, everquest, world of warcraft | 2 Comments »
Marhsall Kirkpatrick- lead blogger for ReadWriteweb – recently lead a survey among Augmented Reality (AR) developers and marketers to figure out what worked and what didn’t in past AR campaigns. To the many readers of this blog that contributed to the survey – thank you!
The report is now available for purchase on the RWW site
Here’s an excerpt from the report’s description:
Become an expert on Augmented Reality (AR) in one quick read. Decrease your AR development time to market by learning from the first wave of early adopters of this new technology. AR offers a new marketing and product paradigm for a high impact, high value customer experience. In the ReadWriteWeb Premium Report Augmented Reality for Marketers and Developers: Analysis of the Leaders, the Challenges and the Future, we profile successful companies and their campaigns as well as development lessons learned.
The report features:
Marshall will share details about this report and explain the process behind the results – at the Augmented Reality Event (2-3 June, 2010 at the Santa Clara Convention Center, California).
If you don’t want to miss this talk and many other talks by AR industry leaders register to the event today! Few discount codes are still available for our devoted Games Alfresco readers:
Go to the registration page, type in code AR245 and you’ll be asked to pay only $245 for 2 full days of AR goodness.
Filed under: AR Advertising, AR Business | Tagged: AR Survey, Marhsall Kirkpatrick, ReadWriteWeb | Leave a comment »
I wish the real products were as cool as the concepts. In due time…
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tagged: augmented reality, concept | 1 Comment »
Part of the Internet economy is built upon the “click-through” or CTR (Click Through Rate.) The CTR attempts to measure customer interest in a particular product. If a person finds the banner ad interesting enough, they will select it and be sent to that site, hopefully to purchase a product (or Conversion Rate.) Thus the effect of the advertising can be measured and billed.
Even the layout of a site can affect the conversion rate. Or in the case of Bing, Microsoft’s new search engine, the color blue can be worth $80 million in additional usage. Website optimization rearranges the layout to achieve fung shui for dollars. What is measured can be improved.
These products, like Google’s search engine, are worth more than just the product itself. And they get first crack at the wealth of information flowing through their servers. Using the misspelled words on Google search, they created the most robust spell-checker on the planet, in every conceivable language.
Using the information of what you click, they can run experiments to see what works best. Collaborative filtering makes recommendations to users based on what other users like. The data exhaust of websites can be as valuable as the product itself.
As augmented reality products use eye-tracking to achieve a realistic virtual overlay like in the recent GM augmented windshield, they are getting more information than just how to align the graphics. Eye-tracking adds a new dimension to the data exhaust. As any professional poker player will tell you, the eyes are the window to the soul, and to the tell. Someone holding pocket kings might look down at their chips the moment they see their cards in anticipation of seeing a bigger pile later. Players wear glasses for a reason. The eyes can give away important information.
Studies on select groups of people using eye-tracking have given broad generalizations (read the before-mentioned link for more details):
1.Headlines draw eyes before pictures.
2. People scan the first couple words of a headline.
3. People scan the left side of a list of headlines.
4. Your headline must grab attention in less than 1 second.
5. Smaller type promotes closer reading.
6. Navigation at the top of the page works best.
7. Short paragraphs encourage reading.
8. Introductory paragraphs enjoy high readership.
9. Ad placement in the top and left positions works best.
10. People notice ads placed close to popular content.
11. People read text ads more than graphic ads.
12. Multimedia works better than text for unfamiliar or conceptual information.
Imagine what can be learned when the eye-tracking is always on and always sending data back to the home servers. Contextual filtering will “pigeon-hole” you into a type of viewer and give you a website more suited to your style of reading. Web design will customize based on your changing eye sight. Older viewers that linger over the words will get larger fonts so reading isn’t so strained. Colorful pictures will attract younger viewers so advertisements will be changed to align with them.
And that GM Augmented Windshield? If their sensors can identify advertising along the side of the road in the form of signs and billboards, then can they collect the data on what works and what doesn’t and sell that to ad agencies.
Like I said, the data exhaust can be more valuable than the data itself. And eye-tracking will prove to be more valuable because its an unconscious reaction. Just be careful where you’re looking.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tagged: advertising, augmented reality, Bing, click through, data exhaust, eye tracking, GM, Google | 3 Comments »
Tomorrow, I’ll be at the IEEE VR 2010 conference in Boston. Monday is dedicated to a series of augmented reality presentations.
One of the most interesting one is:
By the all star team from Ben Gurion University (Israel) and HIT Lab (New Zealand):
When it comes to AR games – we are all still searching for “Pong” a simple game that will captivate millions of players and kickoff this new genre.
One of the challenges in many AR games, is the reliance on printouts of ugly markers.
Plus many games use the markers as controllers which is a bit awkward (especially to a bystander).
Sketching offers an alternative for a more natural user interface.
Sketching is more natural than drawing with a mouse on a PC, even more intuitive that a touch screen. That’s still the first thing that kids are taught in school.
It’s not necessarily a better interface – but it’s an alternative that offers a very intuitive interaction, and enriched the player’s experience. I believe it could create a whole new genre of games.
In place sketching in AR games has huge potential in gaming – but many questions arise:
What’s “In-place AR”? It’s when the augmented content is extracted from the real world (an illustration, an image , a sketch, or a real life object)
Here is the sequence of research efforts leading to this:
Here are 2 game prototypes the team created called AR Gardener and Sketch-Chaser. It is played on a regular white board.
Draw symbols on the white board and 3D content is pulled from a database of objects to appeas in an Augmented Reality (AR) scene.
The sketch determines what object to create, its location, scale, and rotation.
The outer line sketched here defines the game anchor and is served for tracking; in this game it becomes a brown ridge.
Simple symbols drawn generate a couple of benches, a cabin, and in the spirit of the playground theme – rockers, and swings.
Virtual elements could also be created based on a real life object such as a leaf; here it is used to create a patch of grass using the color and shape of the leaf (and no, it can’t recognize that’s a leaf, or 3D object whatsoever)
The color of the marker could define the type of virtual object created: For example, blue represents water. Other objects that are put in it will sink.
In the second game you basically create an obstacle course for a car chase.
It’s a “catch the flag” or tag game. The winner is whoever has the flag for the most time.
First you draw, then play.
Once again, the continuous brown line represents a ridge and bounds the game.
A small circle with a dot in it represents the starting point for the cars.
A flag becomes the flag to capture. A simple square creates a building, etc.
The player adds more ridges to make it more challenging. Adds blue to generate a little pond (which also indicates a different physical trait to this area)
Then – graphics are generated, the players grab their beloved controllers and the battle begins!
This research represents an opportunity for a whole new kind of game experience that could make kids play more in the real world.
Many questions still remain, such as how do you recognize in a sketch what the player really means without requiring her to be an artist or an architect. Or where does the sketch fit in the game play? Before, after or during?
Now, it’s up to game designers to figure out what sketching techniques work best, what’s fun, what’s interesting, and what’s just a doodle.
Filed under: AR Events | Tagged: Ben Gurion University, HIT Lab, Jihad El-Sana, Mark Billinghurst, Nate Hagbi, Oriel Bergig, Raphael Grasset | 5 Comments »
Yesterday we celebrated the vernal equinox, today we celebrate yet another weekly linkfest:
Well yes, looking back at it, this was quite a dry week. Anyway, here’s a couple of weeks old video I just waited for the opportunity to put up in the weekly linkfest. It’s AR in a shoebox, created by Kenneth Bogert, aPhD student from Georgia. You can read more about it over here.
Avez vous une joyeuse semaine de la langue française! (yeah, probably screwed the translation up, sorry int13 guys!)
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tagged: linkfest, mixare | 1 Comment »
Games Alfresco 