Another week passed by, and here we are again, at the weekly linkfest. Today on the linkfest:
Juniper research is predicting that mobile augmented reality will by a $750 million industry by 2014, which is a lot more than the previous $350 million estimate by ABI research. Just a quick reminder – Twitter is valued at one billion dollars.
This week’s video is of a photo booth at Las Vegas that lets you try different hats. I just find this guy’s reactions really funny (and the augmentation is quite good) [via DMfO]
Following video presents a cooperation between Korea’s drugstore Oliveyoung and Samsung (if Google Translate serves me right). Never mind it’s not applied in real time and requires user interaction, but does it increase your sales, making your customers look like clowns?
Well I guess it’s a step in the right direction, but probably the technology is not ready for prime time yet.
Jessica Lamb, a student at Georgetown University pursuing a Master’s degree in Communication, Culture & Technology asks:
If we are more easily able to find information about things and people around us — how do you think that might change the way we interact with people when we rely more and more on computers to deliver information we used to rely on people for?
Do you think that easier access to information will help or hinder meaningful social interactions? Will it create a bigger gap between people who can leverage virtual communications to widen their social network and those who are more reclusive? Do you think AR is more likely to expand or shrink the majority of people’s social networks?
Like many other technologies, scifi grade augmented reality can have both a positive and negative effect on one’s social life. Reclusive people will find the loss of anonymity a real threat, making them even more reclusive. On the other hand, friendly people will find more people to befriended with, and common interests with strangers.
Some will think of AR as a wonderful technology that transfers all the advantages of cyberspace to the real world, and for others, it will bring the dangers.
And yet, Jessica (and yours truly) are interested in your opinion on the subject. Be a science fiction author for a day and share your thoughts in the comments.
A group of students from the National University of Singapore have created a Simcity like (or rather Farmville like) augmented reality game. I’ll stick with the non-augmented version for now.
“I started chatting with a very nice man in line with me at the deli near by office,” said Chicago resident Sue Spiches. “I was waiting for information about him to pop up on my contact lenses, but it never came. For all I know, he was a registered sex offender or a Mormon.”
And this week’s video comes to us from MindSpace Solutions a spinout company from Hit Lab NZ, which created a device called the Digital Binocular Station. Using extra sensitive sensors in the base station, this pair of binoculars can augmented a museum display (or any other room) in a way unmatched by any of their competitors, or at least that’s what the video suggests. I’ll have to visit New Zealand to try it out (here’s my vote for holding ISMAR 2011 in New Zealand).
ARScope originally Presented at SIGGRAPH 2008 by the University of Tokyo (yes, the guys behind ARForce), is obviously not a new concept. However, as far as I can see, it got only little coverage at the time, and certainly deserves our attention.
ARScope is an interesting combination of old world metaphors such as a magnifying glass and a crystal ball, head mounted display and projected AR. The user holds a handheld device covered by reflective material, on which an image is projected from a micro-projector the user wears on his head. Two cameras, one on the handheld device and one on the headset, and a sophisticated algorithm are used to calculate the user’s point of view relative to the handheld device, and thus ARScope is able to project a suitable image. In the case of the crystal ball, it even allows two users to see two different perspectives on the augmented world.
Can’t understand why no-one has commercialized this idea yet. It seems to be far more natural than HMD that blocks your peripheral vision.
Another video can be found here, and an interview with one of ARScope’s creators is here. More details on the project’s website.
I always enjoy featuring a hobbyist augmented reality project, and Davide Byron’s (aka @Need2Revolt) game “Spads and Fokkers” is especially pleasing. On the face of it, it doesn’t look anything special, two virtual planes having a dog fight, using a marker for easy augmented reality:
The twist is in the method the user may exploit in order to control the planes, using a brain-computer interface. Writes Byron:
As for the control mechanism, we actually have some devices that are able to read brianwaves and infere what the user is thinking about, so the choice was easy. The newest and most promising headset for thought control is the epoc, not yet on the market, but with a free SDK I can play with. With this technologies I was actually able to develop something that works and doesn’t need any special stuffs you can’t buy off the shelf. In the story, the players controls 3 airplane each, but in practice it was too hard to simultaneusly control 3 airplanes, so I reduced the number to a single airplane for each player. Furthermore, since the airplanes are not projected into the real world, it’s suggested you wear a HMD.
You can download the binaries and source code and learn more about this interesting project here.
In a striking coincidence last Friday brought two little tidbits showing Microsoft’s interest with augmented reality. First, TechFlash had a Q&A session with Craig Mundie, Microsoft’s chief research and strategy officer. Here’s Mundie on AR:
Q: Another technology that you’ve talked about in the past, and shown, is the idea of augmented reality — overlaying data on top of the real world, as people experience it. Are you expecting that to come more into the marketplace now, and do you expect Microsoft to offer products along those lines?
Mundie: I do believe that will continue to be important. Some of the things we continue to do with Photosynth (a Microsoft 3D photo browsing program) and work related to Bing Maps are trending in that direction, so I think they’ll be a steady progression there. I demonstrated an ultramobile PC where you could use the video camera to look at a scene and then we would do image-matching on the scene to identify well-known items, and then we would bring data forward and annotate the scene dynamically on that. I think that’s certainly in the cards, and you’ll do that on your cell phone.
Then, just to prove the point the Microsoft Research has its sights set on AR, Simon Winder of the Interactive Visual Media group at Microsoft Research (who we mentioned previously here) has uploaded two videos to his Youtube account. The first is another iteration of a treasure hunt powered up by Photosynth to match the camera view to previously recorded scenes:
That’s nothing we haven’t seen before. However, the second video is more conceptual, showing an “augmented cubicle”. I fancy the calendar –
Here are some more augmented reality news stories that happened this week:
MIT’s Sixth Sense to be open-sourced. Well, I know most don’t see any future in projector enabled augmented reality, yet there’s more to Sixth Sense than a projector (gesture recognition, image recognition), and it’s a lot more feasible than see-through HMD AR at this stage, so quite exciting news.
Augmented Planet has started doing a head to head comparison of the different AR browsers out there. Rumor has it that round two features very surprising results.
A demo of Esquire’s augmented reality issue. The comments are even more interesting than the video itself – “Holy balls you guys are innovative! Props!”.
We are signing off this week with a new video out of TU Graz, showing adding annotations online to panoramas. I’ve written about it in more detail before, here, so we can just relax and enjoy the video this time:
Our new project has been revealed today, we are very proud to announce a new Augmented Reality game called Firefighter 360 for the iPhone 3GS.
We actually used our Augmented Reality engine developed for Bionic Eye application to create this little game.
In this life-saving fire-person shooter, you play as a firefighter, rather than gunning down enemies, you will have to douse virtual flames spreading very fast in your real environment. As you physically turn around 360 degrees with your iPhone, you have to methodically extinguish the flames you see, thanks to the camera. The fire itself isn’t just a static “enemy” to be dealt with. Flames will propagate and spread if you don’t put them down completely, the fire itself is capable of doing you harm if you’re not careful.
OK, nuff said. Let’s get it on the App store pronto.
Back when my blog had just a few visitors (only nine months ago), I wrote about ARForce. In a nutshell, ARForce is a concept input device that harness infrared to create something akin to a 3d multitouch marker.
Luckily, Tokyo University, which is behind ARForce, has just uploaded a new video demoing the use of ARForce is several scenarios, so this cool concept will gain larger exposure:
Games Alfresco 