I made it! (though I’ve cheated with that second bullet point, and left Total Immersion’s AR Luke Skywalker out (oh, I’ve cheated again!). Anyway, here’s a nice interview with Robert Scoble about Junaio and AR in general. Apparently Scoble doesn’t think AR is disruptive but fancy it a lot.
(on a personal rant – my submission for a talk titled “Put a Spell: Post Mortem of the first augmented reality learning game for the iPhone” was shamefully rejected!)
5
Number of Augmented Reality game demos on the exhibition floor
Sony EyePet and Move
Vuzix presented a game by Ohan Oda – Columbia University (video below shows a similar game)
AR Drone CES sensation by Parrot and Int13;
Nestle Cereal box as controller by 3DVia-Dassault Systemes;
(Metaio skipped the show this year and is betting on SxSW with ScavengAR)
6
Number of AR capable devices showcased at the event
iPhone, Android, DSi, Sony EyeToy. Plus Windows Phone 7, and Xbox Natal – promised to be released before the end of 2010 (NVidia mobile AR demo was MIA – missing In Action)
27
The least number of back-room meetings focusing on augmented reality which took place at GDC
(or in other words – meetings I was part of…)
100
Percentage of game developers familiar with the concept of augmented reality
(based on my anecdotal survey)
∞ (infinity)
Amount of inspiration at the event for designing augmented reality games
***
So how does GDC 2010 compare with last year’s Tiny Spark of Augmented Reality?
In a nut shell: Augmented Reality made progress in mind share – but not yet in real impact on the game industry.
Wanted: Game Designers to build Augmented Reality Games!
Okay, I get it. A cute little kitten dancing across my keyboard (or other appropriate flat space.) I’m a sucker for augmented pets. I want one.
But why just a cat?
Come on, folks. Can’t we dig a little deeper into the black sticky vat of emotions?
Why can’t we have a pet Banker to poke and kick and make it beg for money before we flick it off the desk into the trashcan? Or a little Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to march around the table and then catapult into oblivion from my spoon?
Why must we tickle my cute reflex? I have darker, baser needs that must be sated.
While the narrator voice harkens back to old 50s ‘Technologies of the Future’ videos, the actual content IS actually from the future. As much as I’d love to have this technology in my Toyota plant, I just can’t see making the ‘how-to’ videos for simple tasks as they suggest. This kind of augmented efficiency improvement activity is only suited for highly complex tasks that are performed regularly by amateurs.
So I think the Maker culture would find better use of the technology when it actually becomes available to the masses. Or it could work as a maintenance guide for short-run products that don’t have a large repair station base. This summer I had to replace a pulley belt on a 70 inch zero-turn mower and the explanation sheet left a lot of steps out. It took four neighbors to figure it out.
Here’s the description from VVT (Finland):
Customer specific and individualised products, small batch sizes, as well as increasing product complexity set higher demands for assembly work. Augmented Assembly is a research project at VTT, where AR technology is applied to increase assembly efficiency. In augmenting assembly work, the assembly worker is guided by virtual objects of components and assembly tools, and visual assembly instructions. The worker sees the augmented view through light weight head mounted devices (e.g. data glasses),and sensors provide feedback from the performed operations.
One of the hurdles in the future of augmented vision is avoiding sensory overload. In Tish Shute’s latest interview, Will Wright notes (and he is far from being the first one to allude to this problem):
our senses are set up to know how to filter out 99% of what is coming into them. That is why they work, and that is what is beneficial. I think that is why AR needs to focus on… You look at what I can find out on Google or whatever, the amount of information is just astronomical. The hard part, the intelligent part, is how do you figure out that one tenth of 1% that I actually care about at this given second?
Researchers from Tokyo’s Meiji University, haven’t quite figured out how to build that filter but they do have a neat way to avoid overloading your senses. In the F.A.R.vision system project, the level of augmentation is determined by your eyebrows. Bend them inward (that is, frown) to make virtual objects more visible.
You may look silly, but that explains why terminators always had an angry face when hunting down Sarah Connor. More information can be found here, in Japanese.
In December I predicted that Oprah will have an AR item on her show during 2010. My prediction is getting one step closer to becoming (augmented) reality today, as Martha Stewart has some sweepstake that involves FLARToolkit
You can try it yourself here, I didn’t bother going through the questionnaire to see exactly what it’s all about.
…and Lola gets a tons of augmented animations straight from the pages of the book directly to your webcam.
This unique picture book for children uses original torn-paper illustrations to tell the fun-filled story of the glamorous Lola the Leopard, who is incredibly vain, and her friend Monty the Meerkat, whose clumsy antics don’t add up to the purrrrrfection Lola is looking for. This book features an amazing bonus feature: Book, Webcam, Action! Just hold the last page of the book up to a web-cam and you’ll see Lola and Monty burst vibrantly to life in full 3D animation, accompanied by music! These are the first books to use augmented reality technology for very young children. “What Lola Wants, Lola Gets!” teaches children about different aspects of growing up in an amusing way that they can relate to.
While using the AR portion of the book sticks you to your computer when you might normally be reading the book to your kids in bed, it’s still a fun way to read a kids book. I suspect we’ll be seeing a lot more of these markerless book products in the near future as publishers, desperate for revenue, latch onto the “next big thing.”
The augmented reality kids book “What Lola Wants…Lola Gets” comes out on April 1st by Scribblers, a division of Book House.
It’s Sunday, and it’s time for another weekly linkfest:
Tish Shute has a short interview with Sims creator (though I’ll always remember him for Simcity) Will Wright. Highlights:
“our senses are set up to know how to filter out 99% of what is coming into them. That is why they work, and that is what is beneficial. I think that is why AR needs to focus on”
The weekly video is not exactly a demo of an augmented reality system, but it relates well to other projected interfaces we have featured previously. It’s made by Microvision, and it’s pretty cool (as long as you don’t have any furniture, rugs or ceiling lamps in your room) [via ecademy.com]:
Normally, I’ll wait with this kind of news till the weekly linkfest. But, hey, then I’ll miss on this scoop (and I’m really hoping this will get me a Pulitzer!). Zugara, makers of the Fashionista application and ZugSTAR, have just released an iPhone application aimed at providing you with the latest augmented reality news.
Named ARWire, this app gives you access to major augmented reality blogs and AR related twitter users (yes, I’m there :)), as well as to zugara’s AR group over at Facebook.
They offer an ad supported free version, and a premium version that I can’t quite locate on the appstore. Now, where are my royalties?
The Swiss Kooaba just keeps on innovating. In January Kooaba was behind the first daily newspaper that was fully augmented. Now it is the first (as far as I can tell) that offers a public, free (though limited) to their image recognition capabilities.
Using the api, one can send up to 50 daily image queries to Kooaba’s servers that cover “close to ten million” movie poster, books and cd covers. They were even nice enough to provide sample code in several programming languages to get you started writing your own application. So basically, you can make your own SnapTell (or a simple Google Goggles clone).
You can find more details about it over at Kooaba’s blog. It’s an interesting move, but I fear that in the long run it won’t suffice to fend off Google. Google has the largest image database, and I would like to see Kooaba open up their “image uploading api” (the one that lets you enter new images to the database) in order to compete with them.
Games Alfresco 
