One of the hurdles in the future of augmented vision is avoiding sensory overload. In Tish Shute’s latest interview, Will Wright notes (and he is far from being the first one to allude to this problem):
our senses are set up to know how to filter out 99% of what is coming into them. That is why they work, and that is what is beneficial. I think that is why AR needs to focus on… You look at what I can find out on Google or whatever, the amount of information is just astronomical. The hard part, the intelligent part, is how do you figure out that one tenth of 1% that I actually care about at this given second?
Researchers from Tokyo’s Meiji University, haven’t quite figured out how to build that filter but they do have a neat way to avoid overloading your senses. In the F.A.R.vision system project, the level of augmentation is determined by your eyebrows. Bend them inward (that is, frown) to make virtual objects more visible.
You may look silly, but that explains why terminators always had an angry face when hunting down Sarah Connor. More information can be found here, in Japanese.
In December I predicted that Oprah will have an AR item on her show during 2010. My prediction is getting one step closer to becoming (augmented) reality today, as Martha Stewart has some sweepstake that involves FLARToolkit
You can try it yourself here, I didn’t bother going through the questionnaire to see exactly what it’s all about.
…and Lola gets a tons of augmented animations straight from the pages of the book directly to your webcam.
This unique picture book for children uses original torn-paper illustrations to tell the fun-filled story of the glamorous Lola the Leopard, who is incredibly vain, and her friend Monty the Meerkat, whose clumsy antics don’t add up to the purrrrrfection Lola is looking for. This book features an amazing bonus feature: Book, Webcam, Action! Just hold the last page of the book up to a web-cam and you’ll see Lola and Monty burst vibrantly to life in full 3D animation, accompanied by music! These are the first books to use augmented reality technology for very young children. “What Lola Wants, Lola Gets!” teaches children about different aspects of growing up in an amusing way that they can relate to.
While using the AR portion of the book sticks you to your computer when you might normally be reading the book to your kids in bed, it’s still a fun way to read a kids book. I suspect we’ll be seeing a lot more of these markerless book products in the near future as publishers, desperate for revenue, latch onto the “next big thing.”
The augmented reality kids book “What Lola Wants…Lola Gets” comes out on April 1st by Scribblers, a division of Book House.
It’s Sunday, and it’s time for another weekly linkfest:
Tish Shute has a short interview with Sims creator (though I’ll always remember him for Simcity) Will Wright. Highlights:
“our senses are set up to know how to filter out 99% of what is coming into them. That is why they work, and that is what is beneficial. I think that is why AR needs to focus on”
The weekly video is not exactly a demo of an augmented reality system, but it relates well to other projected interfaces we have featured previously. It’s made by Microvision, and it’s pretty cool (as long as you don’t have any furniture, rugs or ceiling lamps in your room) [via ecademy.com]:
Normally, I’ll wait with this kind of news till the weekly linkfest. But, hey, then I’ll miss on this scoop (and I’m really hoping this will get me a Pulitzer!). Zugara, makers of the Fashionista application and ZugSTAR, have just released an iPhone application aimed at providing you with the latest augmented reality news.
Named ARWire, this app gives you access to major augmented reality blogs and AR related twitter users (yes, I’m there :)), as well as to zugara’s AR group over at Facebook.
They offer an ad supported free version, and a premium version that I can’t quite locate on the appstore. Now, where are my royalties?
The Swiss Kooaba just keeps on innovating. In January Kooaba was behind the first daily newspaper that was fully augmented. Now it is the first (as far as I can tell) that offers a public, free (though limited) to their image recognition capabilities.
Using the api, one can send up to 50 daily image queries to Kooaba’s servers that cover “close to ten million” movie poster, books and cd covers. They were even nice enough to provide sample code in several programming languages to get you started writing your own application. So basically, you can make your own SnapTell (or a simple Google Goggles clone).
You can find more details about it over at Kooaba’s blog. It’s an interesting move, but I fear that in the long run it won’t suffice to fend off Google. Google has the largest image database, and I would like to see Kooaba open up their “image uploading api” (the one that lets you enter new images to the database) in order to compete with them.
Gesture based computing will open the doors for other creative endeavors. Not sure if this is a concept or the real deal, but who cares, I was entertained by this invisible (augmented reality) synthesizer for ninety seconds.
Playing music with guitars will seem primitive when interpretive dance becomes conceptual music.
Go. A game with such simple rules, that is surprisingly hard to master. It’s the last bastion of humanity against the rising power of game playing artificial intelligence. And now, there’s a cool projected AR board that will help you hone your skills in the game.
Presented by a group of researchers from Japan and Finland, ARGO uses a projector to show game situations, concepts and problems on top of a regular Go board.
As shown in these modes, the advantage of our approach is to allow players to get information through the original interaction offered by the Go board and the stones. By superimposing information onto the board, players can concentrate on the match at hand or self-training without fragmenting their attention towards an instructional book and etc. This is important to make it possible for the players to allocate enough cognitive resources for recognizing the situations in the game. Using original game items as the basis preserves Ma and traditional look-and-feel, such as distance between players, touch of a wooden board and sound of stones.
I really like they used the stones to control the menus. Nice touch, and a cool project as a whole.
Games Alfresco 