You’ve probably already seen the video below about GM’s initiative to put an augmented reality HUD on future windshields because its been posted on many sites. The product, as explained, would improve safety in limited vision situations and create useful information for the viewer.
These are noble goals. But why not have a little fun with the system, too.
1) Relieve rush hour stress with lasers that shoot that annoying “lane switching” guy.
2) Read your tweets on the move (and let voice recognition post your tweets.)
3) Add Unicorns and Rainbows to dreary city streets using a Cornify like add-on.
4) Create a game out of driving safely by checking your distance to next vehicle (okay, this one is noble too, sue me.)
5) Create stats on annoying things like how many stop signs you’ve passed.
6) Play SlugBug with your car.
7) Keep you from running over cute bunnies (your kids will love you.)
Magic, games, education, even live AR coding – we had it all last night at the Augmented Reality Meetup NY (or as we fondly like to call it ARNY.)
51 AR enthusiasts showed up in an amazing location (Thanks Sophia!) – out of 211 registered members – but who’s counting…we are all about quality ;) What I like about this group is that it represents all walks of life: developers, gamers, attorneys, artists, journalists, magicians, even a police officer!
ARNY’s purpose is to help advance the business of Augmented Reality, by bringing together the best of AR with the best talent in NYC. And have fun while at it.
In case you want to remotely take part in this meetup, or any other AR meetup around the world – there is a site for that: ARmeetup.org. (Last night wasn’t recorded due to a Ustream glitch)
Yours truly kicked off the evening with a recount of AR at GDC by the Numbers. Sony Move was the most exciting AR news at GDC.
Then, a fantastic lineup of speakers took the stage:
1) Alejandro Echeverría – Student at Engineering School in Chile, who came all the way from Chile just to be with us (seriously he’s a visiting student at NYU) – presented Games for learning with AR. I loved the simple yet memorable approach to use movement and augmented reality to teach kids about electricity.
2) Patrick O’Shaughnessey – Patched Reality – FLAR in Five: building a FLAR app “from scratch” (mostly) in five minutes. Patrick which is one of the most experienced AR developers out there received the bravery medal of the evening for demostrating live coding!
The feature presentation of the evening was next:
The man you’ve all been waiting for. He’s been traveling all over the world, blowing people’s mind with his AR magic show – and today he’s here, live at ARNY. Ladies and gentleman please welcome – Marco Tempest!
3) Marco Tempest – The highly anticipated Augmented Reality magician brought the house down.
See a live account of the show, along with a rare explanation of how it all works – in the video below:
4) Ohan Oda – Archemist – Augmented Reality Game with Goblin XNA
Last on on the program was another kind of magician, returning fresh from a demo at the game developer conference in San Francisco; he’s known for Goblin XNA – a development framework for AR applications for the Windows platform, and an avid AR game developer. This time, Ohan demonstrated his latest gravity-based AR game using Vuzix Goggles: Arble.
Here’s a video of a previous game with a similar mechanic.
UPDATE: Here’s a live video by ARNY member David Polinchock.
Next was my favorite part – high energy conversations in smaller teams. That’s where the true magic happens. Free beer courtesy of Topp didn’t hurt at all; the discussions went on late into the night.
Have you registered to the Augmented Reality Event (ARE 2010 in 2-3 June, 2010 – Santa Clara, CA)?
You are in luck.
Here is a discount code for the first 100 folks to register to the event (before the end of March). 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.
Watching AR prophet Bruce Sterling, and gaming legend Will Wright deliver keynotes for this price – is a magnificent steal. And on top, participating in more than 30 talks by AR industry leaders will turn these $254 into your best investment of the year ;)
The video gives a good rundown of augmented reality at GDC2010. I don’t have anything to add that Ori didn’t already say earlier this week on Live from GDC.
Augmatic the British company founded by James Alliban (you may remember him from that augmented reality business card) has launched a new tool, called LearnAR.
It is a pack of ten curriculum resources for teachers and students to explore by combining the real world with virtual content using a web cam.
Some of those demos are brilliant. The Geiger counter and physiology ones seem to provide real value when coming to teach such subjects. On the other hand, I really don’t find any benefit of using the English application over a computer game. In a sense LearnAR is showing how gimmicky and how useful AR can be at the same time.
For another perspective on using AR for educational purposes, you should really check out Gail Carmichael’s blog. Since she’s doing her PhD on this subject, she has blogged about some very interesting concepts.
Editor note: OOPS!
Originally this post was scheduled for early December, but somehow I forgot to publish it. Sorry Locatory guys!
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As veteran readers of this blog surely know, official development of Gamaray, an AR browser for Android was terminated, and its code has been open-sourced. Recently I’ve learned about an interesting project by a team from the Open University of the Netherlands, named Locatory, based on Gamaray’s code.
The game’s premise is admittedly not that exciting –
The concept of game is rather easy. Players can compete with each other and gather cards that are hidden in augmented reality. Once a card is taken, it can be dropped at a physical location (figure 3, B). When a card is dropped at the correct location, the player receives a point. (source)
but it’s exciting to see that one can create (semi) augmented reality games in relative ease (especially since Locatory’s own code is freely available). After all, how far is a game such as Locatory from a geo-caching game? If I were a student these days, I would have a go at it (adult life is full of compromises :/).
I made it! (though I’ve cheated with that second bullet point, and left Total Immersion’s AR Luke Skywalker out (oh, I’ve cheated again!). Anyway, here’s a nice interview with Robert Scoble about Junaio and AR in general. Apparently Scoble doesn’t think AR is disruptive but fancy it a lot.
Okay, I get it. A cute little kitten dancing across my keyboard (or other appropriate flat space.) I’m a sucker for augmented pets. I want one.
But why just a cat?
Come on, folks. Can’t we dig a little deeper into the black sticky vat of emotions?
Why can’t we have a pet Banker to poke and kick and make it beg for money before we flick it off the desk into the trashcan? Or a little Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to march around the table and then catapult into oblivion from my spoon?
Why must we tickle my cute reflex? I have darker, baser needs that must be sated.
While the narrator voice harkens back to old 50s ‘Technologies of the Future’ videos, the actual content IS actually from the future. As much as I’d love to have this technology in my Toyota plant, I just can’t see making the ‘how-to’ videos for simple tasks as they suggest. This kind of augmented efficiency improvement activity is only suited for highly complex tasks that are performed regularly by amateurs.
So I think the Maker culture would find better use of the technology when it actually becomes available to the masses. Or it could work as a maintenance guide for short-run products that don’t have a large repair station base. This summer I had to replace a pulley belt on a 70 inch zero-turn mower and the explanation sheet left a lot of steps out. It took four neighbors to figure it out.
Here’s the description from VVT (Finland):
Customer specific and individualised products, small batch sizes, as well as increasing product complexity set higher demands for assembly work. Augmented Assembly is a research project at VTT, where AR technology is applied to increase assembly efficiency. In augmenting assembly work, the assembly worker is guided by virtual objects of components and assembly tools, and visual assembly instructions. The worker sees the augmented view through light weight head mounted devices (e.g. data glasses),and sensors provide feedback from the performed operations.
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.
Games Alfresco 