I hate August. It’s too darn hot over here. Luckily there a few cool and refreshing augmented reality stories this week:
- Lester of Augmented Planet on why augmented reality glasses are 20 years away. I sadly have to agree. It’s another reason why people should consider publicly-installed AR projectors has a viable option.
- Augmented Planet also bring us the story of one gigantic marker and the world’s largest AR project.
- Damon Hernandez continues with his video interviews series, this time with the “AR magician”, Marco Tempest (with some behind the scenes at some of his magics).
- In Indonesia, even a celery can be sexy with the aid of augmented reality (via @TalkingDogAR)
- Real-time OCR/translation of Chinese text through iPhone video camera from Pleco Software is coming soon.
- Change your eye color, look like you have been possessed by a deamon , all via augmented reality – Angel Eyes.
- There was a lot of buzz around Metaio’s iPhone-augmented magazine (it’s a first under some assumptions).
This week’s video is of a year old, yet cool project by Karolina Sobecka with software development by Jim George. Sniff is a projected virtual dog that interacts with people passing it on the street. You can find lots more detail over Sobecka’s site (where you can watch other fun projector based projects, like Chase). [via Augmentology]
Have a good week!
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tagged: linkfest, Metaio, Projector based AR |
Games Alfresco 
Well, I disagree massively with those glass’s points.
We can make decent AR glass’s right now. They just need to be cheaper and better quality.
Theres no massive technical barriers to the glass’s themselves. And this sort of FUD only helps put off company’s investing.
Battery life is an issue, but not a big one. Not giving what people do and put up with on the smartphones today.
It wont take much more power. (maybe even less, in fact, glass’s can project with less light produced?). The difference between a screen and a pair of specs shouldn’t be much.
The rest is mostly general AR criticisms.
Yes, alignment can improve. Image-based positioning, etc. But its good enough to be usefull now.
Its also a software issue…no need for 20 years over it.
Ditto for “sharing data”.
As for needing 4G….rubbish. Just cache stuff. These arn’t video streams we are dealing with. Its perfectly possible to have thousands of annotations cached from your local area and called up when your near.
It doesn’t need to be done server-side and delivered in real time every time you walk a few meters.
Even a 56kb connection could be used for lots of AR quite happily :P
[/rant off]
But battery life is already a problem with smartphones, and although the display itself may take less juice, but the always on GPS, the complicated CPU intensive algorithms would drain the battery in no-time.
As for network connectivity – yes, 4g is not required. Higher bandwidth is not necessary. But latency would play a vital rule if you try to move some of the processing to a remote server.
If you really believe that good glasses are feasible today, I suggest you’ll start working on it – I bet there’s a lot of money in it.