The Augmented Environments lab at Georgia Tech (AELatGT) has recently uploaded to Youtube videos showing off many games developed as projects in the “HAR: AR Game Design Studio” class last year. Blair MacIntyre‘s students came up with some interesting ideas (some would say unconventional), but in my view, there’s one clear winner –
Candy Wars is a physics oriented game, played with your fridge magnets, where the goal is to feed a frog until it explodes. Things couldn’t be better:
Many more video goodies can be found on AELatGT’s Youtube page. Just a little tip – don’t be tempted by the name, GuitAR hero, is nothing more than a rickroll in AR disguise.
The New York times ran a story yesterday about a new breed of field guides, those made not out of paper, but out data bytes and computer vision algorithms.
The article mostly revolved around a new application coming to the iPhone, that enables users to take photographs of leaves and by doing so identify the tree to which they belong.
The computer tree guide is good at narrowing down and finding the right species near the top of the list of possibilities, he said. “Instead of flipping through a field guide with 1,000 images, you are given 5 or 10 choices,” he said. The right choice may be second instead of first sometimes, “but that doesn’t really matter,” he said. “You can always use the English language — a description of the bark, for instance — to do the final identification.”
The technology comes from this group at Columbia University, which on their site you can find the academic papers describing the algorithms that were used in prior incarnations of that application. Now, I know some of you will say that this is not AR, since no image-registering was involved. Well, it fits my definition of AR (it augments our reality), and looking at a previous prototype that involves a HUD, and fiduciary markers, makes things even more obvious:
Anyway, I find this use of AR fascinating. It could really connect kids with nature, detaching them from the computer screen for a while, and transforming any outside walk into an exploration. What do you think?
Here are some more AR related news from around the web:
If you can’t take augmented reality with you for a dive, you may bring augmented fish to your room, with this project from Canon.
I’ve missed that last week, but apparently, Microsoft hired interactive design firm INVIVIA to create videos for some group named “Volume Studios”. That group goal is to “explore in a poetic narrative way how certain developing technologies could begin to blend and augment our daily lives”. Check out two of the (rather bizarre) video at “i started something“.
Drawing in three dimensions, a futuristic design at Yanko Design.
If you always wanted to play an augmented reality game where your goal is to dip chicken nuggets, you need not look any further.
It’s always great to see amateur programmers’ take on AR. This video combined augmented reality with emerging patterns, and I find it lovely
Quote of the week comes from this post at Locative Lab, describing the connection between horror movie “They Live” and the state of augmented reality:
“They Live” in my mind is the canonical, defining vision of what any sort of Augmented Reality should start with. Sort of presenting an “anti” world — the world made strange so that we see it in a different way. Reconstructed. No Pink Pony scenarios or anything that makes the engineer-accountants get eager, sweaty palms. Weird stuff to invert things and better see the alternative possibilities beyond way-finding, tour-guiding, and informatic overlays of measured data.
I don’t exactly agree with this position, but it is an interesting take on what should our augmented future look like.
And finally, to start off the next week with a good feeling, here’s an interesting project, bringing World of Warcraft multiplayer mini games to a desk near you. It’s nothing special, but looks very exciting (at least more exciting than playing the same games using a keyboard):
It’s old news, but I’m allowed to be late since I had to overcome a language barrier. Since 2008, Le Futuroscope, which is a really cool theme park in France with many cinematographic related attractions, has a ride named “les Animaux du Futur” (animals of the future). Based on the BBC show “The Future is Wild“, this ride, created by Total Immersion, takes you through futuristic landscapes and lets you interact with the animals occupying them.
Since its inception, the ride had a home version, that enabled you to see some animals come to life on an AR marker. To welcome a new version of the ride, launched last month, the home version went one step further, and enabled users to play with the dreaded “octopus monkey”, without any need of printed markers. It looks like great fun –
Let’s start with a little contest – whoever comes with a better play on words for a title will be named the king of AR puns. Polydor Records, which is a British record label and part of Universal Music Group, has set up a competition to promote Eminem’s new record Relapse. Contestants are asked to spray a virtual graffiti on an augmented “E” letter (using a FLARToolKit application). Then you may upload your creation to a web-gallery for the whole world to see.
As for the prizes –
You could win the trip of a lifetime to visit Em’s home town of Detroit on an all expenses paid trip (flight and accommodation). Plus, once you’ve touched down you’ll be whisked off to attend a top secret official Eminem album launch event.
You see, you don’t even get to meet with Eminem himself (who, I guess, was never consulted about this marketing campaign). Currently, the gallery features only two entries, so you may actually “win” it. Go here to try out your luck.
There were so many news items this week, I couldn’t cover them all even if I wanted to (though, I might cover some of those next week):
An interesting article at SPRXMobile’s blog (creators of the ATM finder), looking at the augmented reality hype cycle. I had some reservations about the way Maarten’s divided the different AR applications to generations (as you can read in the comments section), so I may write my own take about it soon.
An excellent presentation given by Thomas Purves at Refresh Events – “Designing for an augmented reality world“, where he covers some technological and sociological aspects of AR.
Advertising Age 2 – the rebuttal: “Augmented reality has huge promise, but in the short term it’s a niche technology for a niche audience. … Let’s just hope our desire to hype it AR as the next big thing won’t harm it. “(Augmented Reality: Can the ‘Stars Wars’ Effect Sustain Engagement?)
The new Star Trek movie has some AR in its ARG (but I don’t really CARE).
Quote of the week comes from Joshua Falken (is that a WarGames reference?), as a comment to the “Augmented Comedy” post:
The widespread usage of standard AR toolkits for non-science by self-proclaimed “AR researchers” is the root cause for the bad reputation that AR has now. If one mentions AR / MR as an area of interest to, e.g., computer graphics or computer vision researchers, one immediately is flagged as a mediocre me-too person. Unfortunately, these stereotypes are now applied to good and bad AR researchers alike. Therefore, a funny clip, but the topic, unfortunately, is very serious. Just ask all the people who have found it practically impossible to acquire research funding for AR topics for the past several years already.
You should go read that thread. Have a look at the replies Falken got and express your own opinion!
Finally, to kick-off the coming week, here’s a fun little video of some guys putting the Living Sasquatch application to good use:
According to him it’s “100% random! good for stuff for casinos online ;) because it works with physics so it’s impossible to manage”.
But beware Diego! There are new competitors in the AR advertisements business! Brian Selzer found that ADmmersion.com has a very similar service. No videos yet, though if you register you can try their very basic FLARToolKit demo.
Combining several proven technologies, ADmmersion™ brings advertising to life like never before – giving consumers access to an interactive experience like none other.
For the first time, consumers aren’t just watching ads – they’re part of the experience and can interact with them directly.
Admmersion.com comes to us from DCSI, a company that according to its site, specializes in those LCD screens at grocery stores that show endless ads. It’s good to see they are trying to diversify their business.
Those crazy kids at Georgia Tech. In the last couple of days, we have seen augmented reality used to make you laugh, amazed and uncomfortable, so naturally someone, somehow had to make you scared. That’s where Georgia Tech comes into the picture –
… we are interested in how to create systems where the user loses the sense of mediation, and begins to respond to being immersed in a blended physical/virtual as if it was a single “world.”
Our approach to exploring AR and Presence has been to develop an AR presence questionnaire in parallel with a physiological presence experiment analogous to the UNC VR “pit” experiment, which leverages a strong physiological reaction (fear of heights) to measure presence.
The experiment asked the participants to preform certain tasks around that pit, while their heart rate, galvanic skin response and skin temperature were measured. By doing so, the researchers hoped to develope a quantitative measurement of how immersive was the AR experience. Sadly, they don’t report on their results yet, but you can tell from the video that some participants were shaken by the event.
Next time, they’ll confront volunteers with an approaching virtual train and have paramedics on stand-by.
Eric Gradman dropped me a note about an art installation he presented two weeks ago at an event named Mindshare:
So says Eric:
Live video captured by a camera and is re-projected on the wall behind the camera, functioning like a “magic mirror.” But the CLOUD MIRROR software alters the images on the way to the screen. It runs an algorithm that tracks faces from frame to frame and also examines each frame for 2D barcodes printed on attendee badges. By pairing each face with a badge, and each badge id with a database row, the CLOUD MIRROR can identify by name whoever is standing in front of the installation.
It’s very similar to this Squidder’s video, but adds more ways to embarrass yourself and others. More (mostly technical) details can be found here, but in a nutshell it’s based on ARToolKitPlus, OpenCV for face recognition, and lots of python.
(Remember, you can too drop me a note about any AR related news by sending a mail to rouli.net ~a~t~ gmail.com)
When I get sick of all that marker-based novelty augmented-reality, I protest and complain. But it seems that when Anatoly Zenkov had the same feelings, he created the first (?) comedic clip about AR, entitled “Me Too”:
Games Alfresco 