I’m doing some spring (it’s spring time in Australia*) cleaning in my bookmarks, that’s what I came with:
Genuine Interactive came up with these augmented business cards for its staff, which have been named “the butterfly effect cards”. Thomas has dedicated a whole post for their demo.
Visualcard.me on the other hand, lets you create your own AR enabled business cards, that shows your Twitter and Skype accounts.
I’m sure those two companies are not going to be the last ones that come up with this idea, so stay tuned.
ISMAR 2009 the world’s best augmented reality event starts in 3 days!
If you are still contemplating whether to go – check out what you might be missing on our preview post.
The folks from the Visual Media Lab at Ben Gurion University in collaboration with HIT Lab NZ are preparing a real treat for ISMAR 2009 participants.
Sketch recognition (already covered in our previous post) is a major break away from “ugly” markers or NFT (tracking natural 2d images). It is the dawn of user generated content for Augmented Reality, and an intuitive new interaction approach for changing the CONTENT overlaid on a marker. Big wow.
In-Place 3D Sketching
But the team lead by Nate Hagbi and Oriel Bergig (with support from Jihad El-Sana and Mark Billinghurst) is just warming up…In the next video Nate shows how any sketch you draw on a paper (or even on your hand!) can be tracked.
So are you telling me I won’t need to print stuff every time I want to play with augmented reality?
-That’s right! Hug a tree and save some ink!
Shape Recognition and Pose Estimation
But wait, there is more!
Nate says this demo already runs on an iPhone.
And to prove it, he is willing to share the code used to access the live video on iPhone 3.0. (note: this code accesses a private API on the iPhone SDK)
Ready for the BIG NEWS?
For the first time ever, the core code necessary for real augmented reality “(real” here means precise alignment of graphics overlaid on real life objects) on iPhone 3.0 is available to the public.
The guys at Hit Lab New Zealand and the Visual Media Lab at the Ben Gurion University, Israel, have uploaded a new video presenting the results of their ISMAR09 paper “In-Place 3D Sketching for Authoring and Augmenting Mechanical Systems”. Since the paper is not online yet, I can’t really tell how much of it is really automatic, and how robust is it, but the video is nothing less than magical:
I really envy those future physics high-school students…
As I blogged before, the work Gamaray, one of the prominent early AR browsers, has stopped. At the time, I was suggesting, like many others on Gamaray’s mailing list, that the man behind the project, Clayton Lilly, should release Gamaray’s code to the community. Lilly, I’m happy to report, have decide to do just that. In his recent post to the mailing list, he writes:
I’ve made the source code available in the files section, but there
are some things you should know:
1) Gamaray doesn’t use OpenGL, the 3D objects are all rendered in
software. This means the application will never support the kind of
animations or textures found in Layar and Wikitude 3D.
2) Much of the code is not very well thought out and I don’t plan on
spending any time explaining it.
3) I don’t plan on supporting an open source project, someone else
will need to upload it to a repository and manage the updates.
I would recommend starting fresh and just picking out the useful
tidbits.
So, if you are interested, the source code can be found here. At least one good thing turned out of this dire situation.
I had a pleasant surprise this morning when Chris O’Shea sent me a mail with his latest work Hand from Above. This public art installation features a giant hand that through the magic of OpenCV and some smart programming on O’Shea’s part, tickles, picks and pounds unsuspecting pedestrians:
Yes, I know, it’s not augmented reality according to Azuma’s definition, but it’s certainly original and a lot of fun. It could have been even more fun, if I could control the hand myself, but my god delusions will wait for now. More details on O’Shea’s site, where you should really take a look at “Out of Bounds”, another art installation that has a strong AR motif.
Yes, the following video is nothing more than a demo for Dassault Systemes AR campaign for the feature film “Arthur and the Revenge of Maltazard“. I usually don’t give such videos a full post, especially when there’s no site I can link to, but it seems like a cute game, and what happens at 1:25 surprised me.
Maybe I’m too jaded with AR campaigns that such a trick surprised me, but it made me smile, and that’s good enough.
(via @lavalvirtual)
Arcade Reality is a game, originally developed a couple of years ago for the Palm Treo, by Szymon Ulatowski, the man behind ToySpring, which has an interesting premise. For years, space invaders were slaughtered in video games by arcade dwellers around the world. Now, they stage their revenge in real world and the player must shoot them down via his/her mobile phone:
Recently Ulatowski has ported the game to the iPhone. While on the Treo it used some basic video registration to place the invaders around you, on the iPhone it takes advantage of the compass and accelerometer. Although it does make the alien spaceships a little wobbly, it still looks like the best game of its type currently available for the iPhone and a lot of fun:
This stunning “Jakomini” demo from Graz University – the masters of handheld Augmented Reality – shows a 3D city model being tracked on a “natural feature” surface (or in plain language – a regular bird’s view image of a city)
Wow.
What handheld was used for this demo?
(My guess is it’s Nvidia’s Tegra)
What’s behind the mysterious Jakomini name?
(Jakomini is the 6th District of Graz and the most populous)
Christine Perey, chair of the ISMAR Mobile Committee, has posted two interesting AR articles on O’Reilly Radar – “See it, Follow it” where she discusses real-world recognition, and Look Through the AR Window where she tries to create a taxonomy for mobile AR application (via @noazark)
What’s people’s perception of augmented reality? Is it positive or negative? By studying blogs (which, of course, is a representative sample), public opinion is positive, very positive. (via @augmentreality)
If you are wondering how come there’s not one link pointing to a new augmented reality browser, they had their day yesterday.
This week’s video is of an odd AR application for the iPhone, named Sun Seeker. Basically, it lets you see, overlaid on top of the real world, where the sun is, and where it’s going to be throughout the day and year. Pointless? Well, the video does present an interesting use-case when buying a new house. Learn more about it, here.
Yes, there are so many of new augmented reality browsers each week, they deserve their own post, instead of clogging the weekly linkfest. Here are the browsers that made news this week, in no particular order (well, ok, those they I liked are on top):
Air Painter
Previously we featured geoPaste, an Android application that lets you draw on real-life. Air Painter is a Japanese Android application with a similar premise, though its user interface seems a bit more refined, as can be seen in the video below (don’t worry about the German, you don’t have to understand it to see how cool this application is). More information on AirPainter’s hompeage, and here’s another video.
LooKATOR
LooKATOR shows you WiFi signals floating on top of Android’s video feed. Follow the spots to get stronger signal/stronger dose of radiation. Some details here, no official homepage that I can find (via DMFO)
WhereMark
An augmented reality browser with a slick interface for the iPhone, that features results from Google’s local search. Like most browsers these days, it also lets users add their own content. Some more information, in WhereMark’s homepage.
uTourX
uTourX is an iPhone browser like application, for the niche market of American students touring colleges before they sign in. Nothing much special, except the over-acting in the following video. Homepage
Vicrea’s Browser
I don’t have any better name for it. Vicrea is a Dutch corporation, and the next video shows a concept augmented reality application they are developing. They should really just ask Layar to give them a branded version. More information, here, in Dutch. (via DMFO)
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](https://i0.wp.com/img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png)
Games Alfresco 