Weekly Linkfest – ISMAR Edition

Posted on October 25, 2009 by rouli

Back from my short hiatus. As I wasn’t able to attend ISMAR, I had to follow the conference via the impressions of others:

  • If you hadn’t read it yet, you sould – Ori’s ISMAR summary: “Top 10 tidbits reshaping the augmented reality industry“. I’ve found his sixth bullet point, the shortest of them all, the most interesting. Microsoft is pursuing augmented reality, and they have a plan. Also check out Ori’s impressions from the Mobile Magic Wand seminar.
  • By far the most numerous reports come from Gail Carmichael who covered rather extensively the “Falling in Love with Learning” workshop (part two and three). She also had a post on the Handheld AR Games workshop, and a post covering a bunch of ISMAR papers that revolve around human factors and user interfaces (which is my favorite, touching on some surprising results). Gail also made a video summary of some of the demos presented.
  • Thomas Carpenter had an excellent review of the head mounted displays presented at the conference. Above all, it’s Tom’s enthusiasm that makes me feel depressed that I missed ISMAR.
  • And of course, Robert Rice shares his impressions from ISMAR. His post made me wonder whether there’s a place for another AR conference, dedicated to the industry (while ISMAR will mainly be for the academy). If augmented reality really takes off, I bet O’Reilly will set such a conference.

I’m pretty sure more posts will come later this week (I’m looking at you Tish), and I’ve probably missed a few that were already published, so feel free to add links in the comments. In the meanwhile, today we have not one, but three weekly videos, all coming from ISMAR.
First, here’s conference attendees playing with Sony’s EyePet, the mini-games look like a lot of fun:

Next is the winner of best demo award, Cambridge’s “ProFORMA: Probabilistic Feature-based On-line Rapid Model Acquisition“, showing, well, rapid 3d model acquisition:

Last is a demo for Carnegie Mellon’s “Dynamic Seethroughs: Synthesizing Hidden Views of Moving Objects” paper, presented at ISMAR, courtesy of New Scientist, showing a neat transparent wall trick that could one day be incorporated into cars. I cannot embed the video over here, but do check it out at the link above.

Have an excellent week!

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Augmented Job Board

Posted on October 24, 2009 by rouli

Short note – Layar is looking for Android developers.
As always, you can find this and many other open positions at Games Alfresco’s Jobs section, and you are welcome to tell us about open positions in your company, we’ll post them for free.

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Weekly Linkfest

Posted on October 18, 2009 by rouli

Not going to ISMAR :\. Since going to Florida is not an easy trip for me, I would have like to stay there for more than a couple of days. However, my current workload maje such a vacation impossible. I’m sure Ori and Thomas will do a great work covering it. In the meantime, I’ll take the next few days off from blogging, and will be back with my 200th post (woot!). Hope to see you all at ISMAR Korea!
Now, having done with the excuses, here’s the weekly linkfest:

Articles & Videos

Augmented Reality Browsers:

  • Following Wikitude, media favorite Layar is now on the appstore.
  • Following Yelp, Urbanspoon adds an augmented reality view.
  • Lodestone AR Compass is a browser for the great outdoors. Two bucks and it’s on your iPhone.
  • CiviCast (from CiviGuard) is an augmented reality browser for civil services with a lofty goal – “To guide & protect global civilian populations in the event of a crisis through authoritative & reliable information delivery over mobile communications networks.”
  • Can’t even call it a browser, 3d Compass is just a floating compass for Android.

Other

The weekly video is from the Australian band Lost Valentinos. In order to promote their latest single (Nightmoves) they chose (what a surprise) to use augmented reality. We have seen AR clips before and AR used to promote singles as well (see for example this application for Eminem). However, Lost Valentinos found a simple yet ingenious way to use augmented reality – they shot each band member perform the song on its own, match each one with a marker, and let their fans to compose their own videoclip via AR. As the press release says – “From lead singer Nik performing the song atop a user’s shoulders, to the whole band playing the song at the base of the Eiffel Tower”. Try it yourself over here (and btw, don’t search for nightmoves on Youtube from work).

Have a great week!

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Augmented Reality Reading List for the Weekend

Posted on October 17, 2009 by rouli

Once again this week was full of interesting articles about augmented reality, so much so that I don’t want to mix them with tomorrow’s linkfest. So, if you have some time to burn on your way to ISMAR, or just have some spare time this weekend, I recommend checking these out:

Shopping with AR
Another fine installment from Christine Perey for O’Reilly Radar, where she envisions a world where reality is a huge catalog. Finally, someone has put into words my vision about true AR marketing and not the gimmicks we see these days.

One day, you’re sitting in a café reading the news on your phone and you notice that the person next to you has some really nice footwear. No QR code on the neighbor’s shoes? No problem. You start up your visual search application (no, it’s not available on all handsets), act like you are trying to find something on the newsreader screen while you turn off the camera’s “snap the photo” sound, then discreetly aim and take the photo of the shoes. No one has noticed, right? You wait, you act like you’re still reading the news. Your mobile browser opens and on your screen is the exact model of shoes on your neighbor’s feet. Another click and you can check the price and availability from stores nearby.

AR Wave: Layers and Channels of Social Augmented Experiences
Tish Shute continues to advance her cause for Google Wave based augmented reality environment and then interviews Jeremy Hight about his projects, mapping and social augmentation.

We are in an age of cartographic awareness unseen in hundreds of years. When was the last time that new mapping tools were sold in chain stores and installed in most vehicles? When was the last time that also the augmentation of maps was done by millions (Google map hacks, etc)? The ubiquitous gps maps run in automobiles while people post pictures and graphic pins to denote specific places on on-line maps.

Filtering Reality
Jamais Cascio writes for the Atlantic about why augmented reality can evolve into a self imposed 1984-like scenario.

Conceivably, users could set AR spam filters to block any kind of unpalatable visual information, from political campaign signs to book covers. Parents might want to block sexual or violent images from their kids’ AR systems, and political activists and religious leaders might provide ideologically correct filters for their communities. The bad images get replaced by a red STOP, or perhaps by signs and pictures that reinforce the desired worldview.

Did I mention that the “wrong” people can get replaced too?

3 Questions To Ask Yourself Before Using Augmented Reality In Marketing And Advertising
The guys at Zugara ask the hard question – is an augmented reality campaign really fit your needs.

Too often, we’ve been seeing AR executions that are AR just for the sake of using AR. Do you really need to launch a video in AR? Or a 3D asset? Too many recent AR executions are guilty of this and scream, “WHY!!!” Why are you making your consumer go through unnecessary hoops when they can just as easily view the video or 3D asset in a standard player on your website? An AR initiative should not be exempt from Best Practices online, so it’s always important to put usability before the ‘experience’.

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Even More Augmented Reality Business Cards

Posted on October 17, 2009 by rouli

(previously those and those)

I’m doing some spring (it’s spring time in Australia*) cleaning in my bookmarks, that’s what I came with:
Genuine Interactive came up with these augmented business cards for its staff, which have been named “the butterfly effect cards”. Thomas has dedicated a whole post for their demo.

Visualcard.me on the other hand, lets you create your own AR enabled business cards, that shows your Twitter and Skype accounts.

I’m sure those two companies are not going to be the last ones that come up with this idea, so stay tuned.

* Alas, I’m not in Australia.

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2d Sketches Become 3d Reality

Posted on October 16, 2009 by rouli

The guys at Hit Lab New Zealand and the Visual Media Lab at the Ben Gurion University, Israel, have uploaded a new video presenting the results of their ISMAR09 paper “In-Place 3D Sketching for Authoring and Augmenting Mechanical Systems”. Since the paper is not online yet, I can’t really tell how much of it is really automatic, and how robust is it, but the video is nothing less than magical:

I really envy those future physics high-school students…

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Gamaray’s Source Code is Free to Download

Posted on October 14, 2009 by rouli

As I blogged before, the work Gamaray, one of the prominent early AR browsers, has stopped. At the time, I was suggesting, like many others on Gamaray’s mailing list, that the man behind the project, Clayton Lilly, should release Gamaray’s code to the community. Lilly, I’m happy to report, have decide to do just that. In his recent post to the mailing list, he writes:

I’ve made the source code available in the files section, but there
are some things you should know:

1) Gamaray doesn’t use OpenGL, the 3D objects are all rendered in
software. This means the application will never support the kind of
animations or textures found in Layar and Wikitude 3D.
2) Much of the code is not very well thought out and I don’t plan on
spending any time explaining it.
3) I don’t plan on supporting an open source project, someone else
will need to upload it to a repository and manage the updates.

I would recommend starting fresh and just picking out the useful
tidbits.

So, if you are interested, the source code can be found here. At least one good thing turned out of this dire situation.

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Giant Augmented Hand Terrorizes City

Posted on October 14, 2009 by rouli

I had a pleasant surprise this morning when Chris O’Shea sent me a mail with his latest work Hand from Above. This public art installation features a giant hand that through the magic of OpenCV and some smart programming on O’Shea’s part, tickles, picks and pounds unsuspecting pedestrians:

Yes, I know, it’s not augmented reality according to Azuma’s definition, but it’s certainly original and a lot of fun. It could have been even more fun, if I could control the hand myself, but my god delusions will wait for now. More details on O’Shea’s site, where you should really take a look at “Out of Bounds”, another art installation that has a strong AR motif.

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Yummy Cereal by Dassault Systemes

Posted on October 13, 2009 by rouli

Yes, the following video is nothing more than a demo for Dassault Systemes AR campaign for the feature film “Arthur and the Revenge of Maltazard“. I usually don’t give such videos a full post, especially when there’s no site I can link to, but it seems like a cute game, and what happens at 1:25 surprised me.

Maybe I’m too jaded with AR campaigns that such a trick surprised me, but it made me smile, and that’s good enough.
(via @lavalvirtual)

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Space Invaders in AR

Posted on October 12, 2009 by rouli

Arcade Reality is a game, originally developed a couple of years ago for the Palm Treo, by Szymon Ulatowski, the man behind ToySpring, which has an interesting premise. For years, space invaders were slaughtered in video games by arcade dwellers around the world. Now, they stage their revenge in real world and the player must shoot them down via his/her mobile phone:

Recently Ulatowski has ported the game to the iPhone. While on the Treo it used some basic video registration to place the invaders around you, on the iPhone it takes advantage of the compass and accelerometer. Although it does make the alien spaceships a little wobbly, it still looks like the best game of its type currently available for the iPhone and a lot of fun:

It will cost you $3 on the appstore. More details can be found here.

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