Two More AR Browsers to Join the Party

Posted on August 14, 2009 by rouli

Are you a Wikitude or Layar supporter? Maybe Sekai Camera fan? The battle for supremacy at the augmented reality browsers market is getting more complicated by the minute, with two new contenders joining the fight.
First, acrossair which brought us the Tube Finder, is now showing off a very slick “general purpose” AR browser for the iPhone 3GS:

Next, GraffitiGeo, a fresh new startup that wants to create a Digg like service for real places is working on an AR version of their application, also for the iPhone:

(more details about GraffitiGeo here).

So, now we are at five AR browsers. Anyone wants to bet how many browsers there will be by this time next year? (my guess – only three serious contenders, and one of them will be owned by Google).

Filed under: Uncategorized | Tagged: , , , , , , , , | 5 Comments »

Whatchoo Augmentin’ ’bout, Willis?

Posted on August 13, 2009 by rouli


Obviously the end of the world came, and no one told me. The signs are all here:
1. Canadian based New York Fries is celebrating 25 years of selling, well, fries.
2. To commemorate the occasion, they looked for an eighties icon.
3. They chose Gary Coleman.
4. And made an augmented reality application, on Facebook, were you shake Gary Coleman by shaking a marker, making him drop his fries, and tell you your fortune.

You can try it yourself, here, and find more details at AdFreak, while I’m looking for the nearest nuclear shelter*.

* Yeah, I’m mean, no point commenting about it. I don’t have anything against Mr. Coleman, my sarcasm is targeted solely at the novelty AR application.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Tagged: , , , | 1 Comment »

Pseudo AR Games FTW!

Posted on August 11, 2009 by rouli

A short post to keep you warm while I’m working on a longer series of posts I hope you all find interesting. Anyway, just two days ago I wrote about Acrossair new shooting game, Virus Killer 360:

And I also mentioned iPhone ARKit, an interesting open source project to facilitate augmented reality development for the iPhone. What happens when you merge the two together? this –

It was created by a Japaneses developer going by the nickname mswar, by forking the iPhone ARKit source code and adding OpenGL and GPS geo-positioning. I don’t call it augmented reality, because it has nothing to do with our reality, but I do think it has a potential to supply some moments of fun.
More details here (in Japanese).

Filed under: Uncategorized | Tagged: , , , , | 2 Comments »

Behind the Scenes of Best Buy’s AR Campaign

Posted on August 10, 2009 by rouli

Yesterday I mentioned Best Buy’s AR campaign in the weekly linkfest. The campaign itself is not that exciting, just your typical marker based advertisement. Here’s the obligatory video of some guys on Youtube playing around with it:

However, this time around we get to peek behind the scenes of the campaign thanks to Advertising Age, which held an interview with Spencer Knisely, director-brand identity, print and design at Best Buy. It turns out that while the print ad pushing the site had a circulation of about 43 million people, only 6500 of them have tried the AR application on its first day. Surprisingly, that’s double the number Best Buy have predicted.

Ad Age: Can you tell what the real business result — or conversion — of this was?

Mr. Knisely: We don’t know that yet. We saw comparatively high click-through — 12% — to other pages: the Twelpforce page, the Next Class computing page or to the dot-com site for the Toshiba computer itself. But aggregated, a 12% click-through on an experience like that is fairly decent.

More here.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Tagged: , , , | 1 Comment »

Augmented Reality has Gained Gravity

Posted on August 9, 2009 by Ori Inbar

Here’s the latest AR dish from Ohan Oda and Steve Feiner at Columbia University‘s Computer Graphics and User Interfaces Lab: an augmented reality marble game that uses gravity as a game controller. No iPhone required.

See the video and recipe after the jump.

Continue reading →

Filed under: Uncategorized | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , | 7 Comments »

Weekly Linkfest

Posted on August 9, 2009 by rouli

Another week passed by, and I was especially lazy this week. Sorry, but apart from those augmented strippers from Monday, nothing excited me enough (or annoyed me enough) to write a post about. Which means, we have an extra long linkfest today.

However before we start, I would like to learn a thing or two about our dedicated readers. The next poll asks you to define yourself, and you may select more than one answer. Are you more the creative kind of person, or a problem solver? Please vote, and I’ll post the results on next week’s linkfest:

And now, for the links:

The quote of the week comes from Tish Shute’s interview with Robert Rice:

This is part of the problem right now though…no one seems to be thinking about the bigger picture much. All of the effort is either on making the next cool ad campaign for a car or a movie, or creating a tool to tell you where the nearest thingamajig is, but in a really cool fashion on a mobile device.

No one is talking much about filtering data, privilege systems, standards, third party tools, interoperability, and so on. There is also little conversation about where hardware is going. Right now everyone is developing software based on what hardware is available. This needs to change where hardware is being developed to take advantage of new software coming out (this happened in the PC industry a while back and growth accelerated dramatically).

And finally, the next video is of GeoBeagle, an application for Android that adds an augmented reality twist to geo-caching (which is an idea I first encountered here). Interestingly, it uses Wikitude’s API, showing off some of the power of that platform.

Have a nice week!

Filed under: Uncategorized | Tagged: , , , , , | 5 Comments »

AR Strippers, Oh My!

Posted on August 4, 2009 by rouli

Well, you knew this day will come sooner or later. As any other media before it, porn was destined to reach augmented reality. But I bet you could never guess that the first semi-erotic application will be created to promote a movie.
Apparently, Gamer‘s last attempt at augmented reality advertisement didn’t bring the masses, so they launched this site. All for the better I guess.

The application lets you select between four exotic dancers, and about five dances for each dancer. I would have written about it earlier, but being a thorough journalist as I am, I had to test all the available options.
[via akihabaranews.com

Filed under: Uncategorized | Tagged: , , | 4 Comments »

Weekly Linkfest

Posted on August 2, 2009 by rouli

Here are just some of the things that happened this week in the realm of Augmented Reality, which I didn’t have the time to write a whole post about. It’s going to be a long post, you may want to prepare a snack before you go ahead.

This week’s video comes from Metaio, which launched an ambitious initiative named “metaio World“. There haven’t given much information about it, but here’s a short quote –

You can view, create, upload, modify, navigate, share, rate or play games with real 3D content anywhere in the real world. Add your 3D and post interactive elements, your favourite photos, twitter messages or anything you can imagine.

An ambitious project deserves an ambitious video, but can they deliver?

Have a nice week!

Filed under: Uncategorized | Tagged: , , , , | 4 Comments »

Augmented Reality Won’t Make your App Cooler

Posted on August 1, 2009 by rouli

Augmented Traffic Views is a pretty cool app that links your Android phone to Toronto’s traffic cameras to help you make better decisions for your daily commute. Alas, I don’t understand what the augmented reality part contributes to the application.
As a matter of fact, it seems to only hurt usability. Would you rather physically turn around yourself every time you want to see the video input coming from some traffic camera, or would you prefer a scrollable list of cameras and their locations? I would go with the second option. Moreover, you can’t really use it in AR mode while driving, unless I’m mistaken and you can do u-turns in the middle of the road in Canada.

Once again, it’s a useful application, and they have done a right choice giving it text to speech capabilities, but having an augmented reality interface seems to me contrived. True, AR has a natural appeal when it comes to house listing, as can be seen by the end of the video, but then again, house listing is not really about traffic views. I hope the guys behind this app (who are you?) will reconsider their use-cases before releasing it to the Android’s app store.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Tagged: , , | Leave a comment »

Augmented DJ by Wrigley

Posted on July 31, 2009 by rouli

The good guys from UK based creative agency Exposure and the Australian AR wizards from Boffswana show us that using augmented reality in a campaign, doesn’t necessarily means having a “look at the novelty” brain dead application (unlike, say, the Always one).
For the coming launch of Wrigley’s 5 brand of gums in France, they have created an application that lets users mix together club-music via AR markers. There are three markers representing gum flavors, each linked to a certain track, and one master marker to rule them all. The markers’ distance from the master marker and their relative angles determine the volume and effects for each track.

Once you have become experienced in the ways of the augmented DJ, you can record your own mix, upload it to the site’s gallery, and even embed it in your blog. Now, since I’m tone-deaf, and my laptop is not strong enough to register four markers at once, I’m going to embed a creation by some other guy (sorry Games Alfresco and RSS readers, no embedding for you):

Now, I’m well aware that the idea of an augmented reality DJ set is not a new one. As a matter of fact, just a few weeks ago we’ve learned about the ARDJ art project. And this application is not perfect, as it requires a good computer and setting to work, and the embedding issue could be solved if videos were hosted on Youtube. Nevertheless, we should recommend Exposure and Boffswana for not going with the easy solution, and creating a very interactive experience (only Living Sasquatch is in this league, also done by Boffswana). Now, lets see more campaigns of this kind instead of the other “novelty” kind.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Tagged: , , , | 4 Comments »

« Previous Page — Next Page »