Augmented Reality, Now with Wings

Posted on July 29, 2009 by rouli

Proctor & Gamble has launched a new AR campaign to promote some kind of Always “Infinity Pads”.

Since I’ve offended to many people in the last few weeks I’ll keep mum this time. However, the kind people at AgencySpy, who are also responsible for uploading the above video to Youtube, had this to say:

This campaign is complete crap. …
P&G pitched the AR piece to you ladies as magic, which of course it isn’t. This is the kind of advertising that reiterates how ineffective “look at me” work truly is. It’s also annoying and dilutes the power of this new tool for those who have salient ideas for how to use it.

Even more amazing is that this is not even the first AR campaign for feminine product to have an AR ad. Kotex (in Turkey) had one a few months ago.

via AgencySpy where you can also read the ridiculous press release by Proctor & Gamble.

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

Nerds Augment Themselves to become Optimus Prime

Posted on July 28, 2009 by rouli

For some reason, one of my most successful posts, was the one about Total Immersion’s promotion for Transformers 2, where everyone had the chance to virtually try an Optimus Prime mask.
Now, a bunch of nerds (no other word to describe them, sorry), have taken their Transformers fandom to a whole new level. If you are a pregnant woman, younger than 15 or suffer from heart arrhythmia, please don’t push the play button. You see, AR entering the mainstream is not always a good thing:

Filed under: Uncategorized | Tagged: , , | 6 Comments »

Bokode – Amazing New Type of Barcode

Posted on July 27, 2009 by rouli

I find the next piece of research so amazingly cool that I can’t understand how I’ve missed for so long (a whole three days!). Submitted to next month’s SIGGRAPH, MIT’s Media Lab Bokode is a new way to visually code information.
I’m not going to try to explain the technology behind it (that’s what the paper for), but it a nutshell it uses a small light source to create an image consisting of thousands of pixels. The pixels are only discernible when a camera is looking at the Bokode while its focus is set to infinity. I hope the next video explains it better:

As the video above shows, there are very nice implications to augmented reality. Aside from coding the identity of the object, it can also encode how’s the object positioned in comparison to your camera. Though, if I understood correctly, the demonstration above uses two cameras, one shooting the object in focus, while the other looks at the Bokode.
Another obstacle in the way of wide adoption is that the Bokode currently requires an energy source to operate. Nevertheless, it has already taken a step in the right direction, and currently have a short page on Wikipedia.
More information here and here. Via Augmented.org.

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

Weekly Linkfest

Posted on July 26, 2009 by rouli

Another lazy summer week has passed by (unless you live below the equator), bringing us some more augmented reality news:

This week’s video comes to us from Italian Giancarlo Facoetti, who used ARToolKit to create a simple game, that actually looks like some harmless fun:

Have a nice week!

Filed under: Uncategorized | Tagged: , , , , | 3 Comments »

ARound: You know, for Nokia users

Posted on July 23, 2009 by rouli

[A short apology. A few days ago, in a bout of paranoia, I wrote a short post suspecting that Sequence Point’s ARound may be some kind of malware. I jumped to conclusions due to some intriguing aspects in Sequence Point’s site. I should have contacted the developers before posting, but regretfully I did not. After David Caabeiro of Sequence Point contacted me, I quickly pulled the post, understanding my mistake. Here’s setting the record straight]

Got a Nokia N97 phone and envy all those cool guys with their slick iPhones or Android phones with their cool augmented reality applications? Yearn for the days when Nokia was a leader in mobile AR? Spanish company Sequence Point Software might have the solution for your desires.
Called ARound, this is the Symbian equivalent of Wikitude and Layar. Using GPS and compass readings (though future versions may include object recognition), ARound overlays the video input with points of interest gathered from 3rd party data sources, and provides details on close by landmarks.

Designed to be pluggable, ARound may interest developers as well. David Caabeiro of Sequence Point writes:

Our idea is allowing 3rd party developers to add value at different
levels of the application in a simple way: We realize Symbian is not
the easiest platform to play around so this hopefully makes things
easier for developers interested to include Symbian in their
offerings. The first plugins to be made available for developers will
be the so called “data sources”, which will allow them to integrate
any content (from mashups, etc) into the application. Later some other
plugin details will be made available, allowing further customization
and integration into existing applications. For example, one of the
first goals is adding OpenGL support for those interested in doing
more advanced rendering.

Best of all, a beta version can be downloaded freely, so if you are a N97 owner, go check it out, and share your impression in the comment section.

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

Mattel Launches Augmented Toys at Comic Con

Posted on July 23, 2009 by rouli

Barbie maker Mattel, and augmented reality provider Total Immersion, have joined forces to bring the public the first retail toys that are AR enhanced (or so says their press release). Unveiled today at Comic-Con 2009, each product in Mattel’s line of action figures and vehicles based on James Cameron coming film Avatar will come with a –

3-D web tag, called an i-TAG, which consumers can “scan” using a home computer’s webcam. Scanning the i-TAG will reveal special content onscreen unique to the corresponding product. Exact content varies for each item, but could include biographical information, additional images and animated models of the figures. When the i-TAG for deluxe figures, vehicles or creatures are placed under a webcam, animated 3-D models will “come alive” through engaging, evading or defending moves. Place two i-TAGs from the “Battle Pack” together and the 3-D images will interact with each other.

3d web tag? Sounds impressive, but thanks to this next video clip, we can all see it’s nothing more than a marker card:

Still, it looks cool and I’m quite sure it’s gonna be a hit this Christmas season (unless the film itself bombs). Pity they used such a convoluted term for it.

press release, via I4U news.

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

AR Lite with SREngine Lite

Posted on July 21, 2009 by rouli

This writer’s favorite AR developer, Sein Kanemura, has just posted an English description of his latest mobile application SREngine Lite. Unlike the full blown SREngine, this one does not try to augment a video feed, but rather tackles the simpler task of mobile image recognition. It similar to Nokia’s Point and Find and some other mobile applications, but I find its interface very attractive:

The Lite version makes do without a server (up to 20 images can be stored on the device), doesn’t require GPS or compass readings, so it works on the iPhone 3G as well as on the iPhone 3GS, and it’s purely based on image recognition.

SREngine Lite recently won the Japanese “Next-Generation Communications & Marketing” award under the Future category. And, following the trend, Kanemura promises to “release SREngine Lite SDK for iPhone which allows developers to design own ar app.”.

More details here. Tom covered SREngine Lite a couple of week ago, but I’ve waited for the English translation, mistrusting Google Translate.

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

Cool Augmented Business Card from Toxin Labs

Posted on July 20, 2009 by rouli

While the whole web is gushing over James Alliban‘s augmented business card, I find the next implementation even more exciting. Don’t get me wrong, Alliban’s card is cool, but this one is a bit more useful:

It was created by Jonas Jäger, and more importantly, he doesn’t plan to keep the technology to himself. Jäger plans to release a front-end application that will let you create your own “presentation” that will be displayed when your business card is flashed in front of a web camera. It uses a QR code to identify your card from others, and an AR marker to have FLARToolKit something to get a fix on. All in all, it answers Thomas Carpenter’s call to create a service for these kind of augmented business cards, and really looks good.

(Augmented Business Card at Toxin Labs)

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

Weekly Linkfest

Posted on July 19, 2009 by rouli

This passing week’s trending augmented reality topics were AcrossAir’s Tube Locator (which is two weeks old) and James Alliban’s augmented business card (which is over a month old, can’t see why it became so popular suddenly). Let’s hope next week will bring some fresh AR news. As a matter of fact, tomorrow I’ll cover an even cooler augmented business card concept. In the meanwhile, here’s this week’s linkfest:

Weekly quote:

However, I am nervous about the potential AR hype bubble. I’m pushing
“real AR” (which right now means tabletop) and the importance of tight
registration whenever I talk to the press or companies, because I want
as many people to realize that whether these apps succeed or fail
should not really be used as a metric of the potential success or
failure of AR.

Blair MacIntyre from an interesting discussion on the AR Forum whether the recent set of GPS based applications are AR or not (a point I’ve briefly touched here. I much prefer those pseudo AR application over the novelty AR applications).

This week’s video comes to us from Dutch design company Strafwerk. They described this video as “welcome to the future”, but I think it’s actually worse than Zugara‘s clothes shopping application (which wasn’t that great on itself):

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

Has Augmented Reality Arrived to the iPhone ?

Posted on July 14, 2009 by Ori Inbar

Fellow augmented reality enthusiasts!

Checkout the news in the iPhone 3.1 Beta 2 SDK (you need to login.)

It may treasure what we’ve all been waiting for. The elusive API. The holy access to  live video on the iPhone.

We will never know if the Open Letter to Apple had any dent on Apple’s decision to introduce the new APIs – but for a moment – we are blissful.

By tomorrow we’ll know for sure if it works. What ever the outcome, at least we made a lot of friends and discovered a swarm of AR developers eager to bring the augmented reality experience to the masses.

Thank you all for the overwhelming response!

And let me challenge you:

The first to confirm the above theory will be indicted to

Games Alfresco’s Hall of Fame.

Thanks Mike for the tip!

Reblog this post [with Zemanta]

Filed under: Uncategorized | Tagged: , , | 9 Comments »

« Previous Page — Next Page »