Weekly Linkfest

Posted on January 24, 2010 by rouli

Another week, another linkfest:

  • It all started with this funny look at augmented reality by the Gaurdian’s Charlie Brooker. Among other things Brooker imagines a world where unpleasant sights (such as poor people – his words, not mine) are transformed by AR goggles.
  • Futurismic developed that basic idea. In “Re-skinning the city – the dark side of augmented reality” they suggest that spam could become a ray of hope, as a medium through which (unpleasant) reality can still confront us in our utopian augmented world.
  • Finally, Toby of augmented.org explains why there are several other issues we should worry about before concerning ourselves with invisible homeless people. (thanks Thomas)
  • The first commercial AR event will be held in Santa Clara in early June. Unless, you count this other conference. The former is organized by Ori Inbar, Tish Shute and whurley (William Hurley). The latter is not. Your choice.
  • If you weren’t there, you may find the following recording of ARNY January meet up interesting (I can’t get ustream to work properly on my computer, so I can’t tell).
  • Some info about the intriguing Mirascape and a chance to become an alpha tester.
  • Financial Times “Reality Made Larger the Life” gives an overview on augmented reality.
  • Harry Potter. Augmented Reality Map. USA Today.
  • Dr Skully. Augmented Reality Fortune Teller.

We have a double feature for our weekly video. The next two clips bring AR to the big screen. The very big screen. First is Hungry Hungry Eat Head, an art installation commissioned by City of Edinburgh Council (more info, via Wooster Collective):

and next is another art installation called “A Someone Else’s Problem Field” commissioned for the Next Wave Festivals, which is mostly strange (more info):

That’s it, have a nice week!

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Social Commons for the Physical World Platform

Posted on January 23, 2010 by rouli

Tish Shute holds such great interviews for UgoTrade, that it should be considered a crime not to read them if you are an augmented reality fan or professional. Her last interview with Anselm Hook is especially interesting and engaging.

However, Tish’s pieces are usually quite long, and may be intimidating. In order to lure you into reading the whole interview with Hook, here are a few hand picked quotes:

Even things like Google Maps or mapping systems we think are so great are really just kind of almost an aspect of a hyper-local view. You actually don’t really care what is happening 10 blocks away or 100 blocks away. If you could satisfy those same interests and needs within a single block, one block away, you would probably be really happy. You really just want to satisfy needs and interests, find ways to contribute, or get yourself fed, or whatever it is you want. And AR seemed to be the playground to really explore the human condition.

There is a real risk of our augmented reality world being owned by interests which are not our own. There is a real question of when you hold up that AR goggle, what are you going to see? Are you going to see corporate advertising? Are you going to see your friends’ comments or criticisms? It is going to be an Iran or a democracy, right? It is unclear.

We, as a community, need to assert an ownership, kind of a commons, over how computers will translate what they see to information that we perceive.

As we move towards a physical internet where there’s no clicking and there’s no interface and the computer’s just telling you what it thinks you’re looking at, translating, you know, an image of a billboard to the name of the rock star who’s on that billboard, or translating the list of ingredients on a can of soup to the source outlets where it thinks that, those ingredients came from. When you have that kind of automated mediation, the question of trust definitely arises.

Search needs to be inverted, trust filters need to be built. We need to democratically own our data institutions. We don’t right now. That will be more of a concern, especially with AR.

Again, this is a very concentrated version of a most excellent interview. The ultimate augmented reality experience will be much different from today’s web. Instead of entering a search string and getting 10 results as possible matches, we will look at the world, and for each physical item we will get the first “I’m feeling lucky” result, as Google has determined for us.

If a new data provider finds it very challenging getting into the Google’s organic results these days, imagine how hard it would be for such a provider to win the first and only spot in tomorrow’s augmented search results. That’s assuming Google will keep playing fair and show results by how well they fit the search query (let’s just assume they are currently playing fair).

On the other hand, democratizing the outernet’s search engine may result with increased spam results. You may look at the Venus of Milo through your AR goggles, and get ads about prolonging your manhood. Wikipedia successfully fight spammers and hooligans. But, is there another Wikipedia like enterprise? Can the whole outernet be moderated by a limited number of industrious editors?

I don’t have an answer for any of those questions, but it seems to me that’s those are the most exciting and important problems we can try and tackle in the coming year. Tish advances the idea of a federated Google Wave-based infrastructure for AR. What do you think?

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Real-Time 3D Modeling for Augmented Reality

Posted on January 22, 2010 by thomaskcarpenter

I’m a big geek when it comes to the behind-the-scenes number crunching stuff that makes augmented reality happen. How it all works is a fascinating look at dynamic systems in concert. The two videos below show how on the fly modeling of objects can help create a fully interactive world with occlusion, shadows and other 3D illusions needed to created reality out of pixels.

The first comes from the Australian Center for Visual Technologies (ACVT) with a program called Jiim.  It allows in-situ modeling of the enviroment by picking up points and then allowing the user, in real-time, to draw in the world with those points as reference.   The resulting physics demonstration is quite impressive from throwing balls to killing moles.

The second video shows use of the MRToolKit to model a Chinese dragon figure in real-time and then interact with it.  The results aren’t as impressive as the Jimm ACVT video, but still, it’s nice to have options.

Having played around with a few AR systems like Metaio’s Unifeye, I can say that the programs in these videos look easier to interact with than what I’ve used before.  Instead of programming numbers and coordinate systems, the user can mouse click the world into existence.  Imagine if groups of people collectively worked on drawing in a city to create a general playground for augmented reality.  Just add some sweet HMDs and a SDK to create games and AR would be unleashed.

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Augmented Reality, Newspapers’ Last Best Hope?

Posted on January 22, 2010 by rouli

We all know the future looks quite bleak for newspapers and journals. Many publications have already fallen victims to the predatory internet with its free, easily accessible and real time reports. Some have speculated that newspapers must either over-specialize or abandon their offline presence in order to survive the coming decade.

However, there’s another option – forming a merger between an online and an offline presence, via augmented reality. We’ve already seen Esquire toying with such a concept, but now a daily newspaper in Switzerland has made a giant leap ahead.

Since this Wednesday, every page of the Swiss Blick newspaper can be scanned using Kooaba, an iPhone/Android application. Once scanned and identified, the user can see additional information about the articles or ads visible in the page, add them to her online library, and share with friends. Remember, this is not a single issue being augmented, but rather every issue from now on will have this extra layer of information.

Follow the link to see a video of Blick being augmented, but since that video can’t be embeded, here’s another one, showcasing Kooaba’s technology:

More information here.

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Weird Augmented T-Shirt Game

Posted on January 20, 2010 by thomaskcarpenter

In a strange Frankenstein stitched together way, this augmented reality product is both a piece of textile covering and a game of rock-paper-scissors.  If that doesn’t make any sense to you then watch the video and see the site for more details. 

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Domestic Robocop

Posted on January 19, 2010 by rouli

I’m a bit late with this – Toby already wrote a post about it last week, and I meant to do the same, but was too sick to write a post this wonderful next concept video deserves. It reminds me of a short story by Asimov where people grew so reliant on computers they forgot how to do basic arithmetic.

Created by Keiichi Matsuda of the Bartlett School of Architecture in London. You might wonder what does an architect have to do with augmented reality (and the art of making tea). Kei tried to explain:

The question of the connection with architecture comes up a lot, but its not necessary to think of it in the context of buildings etc. Architecture as a study is about spatial design, encompassing a lot of social, philosophical, economic and technological theory; more interesting than placing beams! Im currently working in a lot of media, so its kind of unlikely that ill go on to be an architect, but it makes a lot of sense for architects to be interested in VR, AR, game design etc., even without having a technical background as they touch fundamentally on how we operate in space. AR particularly is a really exciting technology, as it interacts directly with the built environment.
The film (domestic robocop) is pessimistic in a way; I believe that AR could become essential to us very quickly, once certain standards and economic models are in place. Becoming incapable of making a cup of tea and navigating your own house is obviously quite far fetched, but is maybe part of a broader comment about our reliance on technology and the all-infiltrating nature of consumer culture. With all the hype around AR at the moment, I think its a good thing to speculate as to what effect it might have on our lives, positive or negative, in the long term.

Kei currently works on a thesis titled ‘Pluralism and Identity in Augmented Reality’, and I bet we will see many other interesting concepts and ideas out of him.

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Augmented Reality Panel at Web 2.0 Expo and Explosion in AR Meetups

Posted on January 18, 2010 by Ori Inbar

Don’t you love going to conferences that take place in your home town?
And how about being invited to talk about your #1 passion?

Double awesome.

Last November, I was lucky enough to participate in a panel about augmented reality at the Web 2.0 Expo. (In all fairness, it was part of Web2Open co-located with Web 2.0)

The fun actually started the night before at a meetup organized by John Havens which was a great warm up for the real deal.

John also moderated the panel which included the following participants:

Robert Rice, CEO of Neogence delivered as usual a great intro to augmented reality and explained the virtues of the AR Consortium;

Jack Mason (Global Business Services, Strategic Programs and Social Media at IBM)
opened our eyes to the possibilities (and concerns) revolving around AR;

Lynne d Johnson, SVP Social Media at the Advertising Research Foundation and host of the NYC Android Developer’s Meetup showed off the latest AR rage embodied in this week’s Esquire Magazine: the augmented reality issue;

Erik Manley: Manager, Digital Media at GE and Michael Eisenreich: Technology Leader for GE’s company-wide Internet presence – proudly presented what I describe as the first high production augmented reality campaign ever. It’s probably one of the key reasons AR went off the charts on Google trends in the first quarter of the year.

Matt Szymczyk, CEO of Zugara, demonstrated Fashionista, a virtual dressing room his company just launched with Rich Relevance. Who says AR is just a novelty? This is a very Cool and practical use of augmented reality on webcams.

Marco Neumann, CEO and Founder of KONA, and the Organizer for New York Semantic web meet up gave the…semantic web back story behind augmented reality. 

All great guys and gals, enthusiastic about augmented reality, and…doing something about it.

Yours truly gave a little schpiel about Ogmento and demonstrated the upcoming (currently in beta) learning game for the iPhone: Put A Spell Learn to Spell with Augmented Reality.

Here is a video of my 100 slides under 5 minutes intro (seriously):

The crowed was not huge but very engaged. In the spirit of the web2Open unconference most of the interesting discussions happened afterwards.

We will be back at Porter Novelli’s office (Thanks John for hosting once again!) for the upcoming Augmented Reality NY (ARNY) meetup this Tuesday, featuring an amazing line up of speakers and demos:
1) John Swords – Circ.us – his latest AR game developed for Cisco Systems

2) Ryan Charles – Zagat– New Augmented Reality view integrated into Zagat’s flagship restaurant rating and review app, Zagat To Go

3) Noora Guldemond – Metaio – LEGO application and mobile markerless tracking

4) Dana Farbo – President of Acrossair – will present the fresh new Acrossair AR Browser

5) Craig Kapp – NYU – Whisper Deck – will introduce an experimental interface to access information using AR

These days, AR Meetups are all the rage – sprouting like mushrooms around the globe: From Los Angeles, to Palo Alto, Chicago, Raleigh, Toronto,  London, Manchester, Switzerland, and all the way to New Zealand). Here’s a big shout out to all our friends around the world – and thanks to Chris Grayson – we now have a live stream channel for all AR meetups – so you can participate in real time from the comfort of your home!
(though it’s much more fun being there in person)

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Weekly Linkfest

Posted on January 17, 2010 by rouli

Quite a busy week, and unfortunately I was knocked out by the cold to write about all that was happening in real time. Luckily, the weekly linkfest is here as a compensation of sorts.

Remember the fake iPhone app Nude It (yes, there’s a real app by this name, but it doesn’t have the same “capabilities”)? Well, forget about it. This fake app, named iNaked, is far better:

As a matter of fact, I have no clue how it was done. It seems to me that making this fake demo took more time than it took making some of the real AR applications out there. (via Gizmodo)

Anyway, have a great week!

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Training the Visual Way

Posted on January 14, 2010 by thomaskcarpenter

A picture is worth a thousand words. 

Homo sapiens are visual creatures.  We receive 75% of our information through our eyes.  Explaining how to do something can be tedious and inefficient.  Augmented reality offers a visual medium for explanation.  This quick demo on how to assemble a LEGO tower using ARToolKit illustrates how effective this technique can be.  If you don’t believe me, give a friend a pile of LEGOs and then try to explain how to create the tower in the video.  Time your result and compare it.  I’ll guarantee the AR method will win.

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Augmented Reality for CRPS Treatment

Posted on January 13, 2010 by thomaskcarpenter

Augmented reality can help create illusions for the mind.  These phantoms are usually considered as avatars or game devices, but using virtual avatars in a real enviroment can also help solve medical issues related to pain.

CRPS, or Complex Region Pain Syndrome, is a chronic pain condition. 

The key symptom of CRPS is continuous, intense pain out of proportion to the severity of the injury, which gets worse rather than better over time. CRPS most often affects one of the arms, legs, hands, or feet.  Often the pain spreads to include the entire arm or leg.  Typical features include dramatic changes in the color and temperature of the skin over the affected limb or body part, accompanied by intense burning pain, skin sensitivity, sweating, and swelling.  Doctors aren’t sure what causes CRPS.  In some cases the sympathetic nervous system plays an important role in sustaining the pain.  Another theory is that CRPS is caused by a triggering of the immune response, which leads to the characteristic inflammatory symptoms of redness, warmth, and swelling in the affected area.

Because pain has roots within the mind, non-typical treatments like mirror work can help reduce discomfort.  The group 09am734 group at AAU have developed an augmented reality solution to the mirror treatment.  Using AR, they can simulate work in the opposite hand forcing the participant to use their pain hand (or appropriate limb.)

This kind of treatment can also work for missing limb patients who are experiencing phantom pain.  It’s good to see applications of AR stepping outside of the normal marketing or reality browsers and solve real medical problems.

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