Earlier today, Thomas Carpenter posted this video and asked whether the augmented reality mode adds anything to the application.
The answer is probably not. In my opinion we are seeing AR evolving into a cool feature for location based services, much like rounded corners was the cool thing to have if you were a web 2.0 application. Yes, in some applications, like Layar and Wikitude, augmented reality is currently a major feature, but in the long run its the location-oriented content they should focus on, not on how to present it.
Having augmented reality as just another cool feature is not a bad thing. It can actually be the thing that saves it from following the same path that virtual reality went by. Obviously, the hardware today is not good enough for terminator-vision grade of AR. However, having augmented reality play a low-key role for now may keep it around till we’ll have the right hardware.
Or maybe I’m just reading too much into a Youtube video. Oh, that reminds me – the application is called WorkSnug, and you can find more about it here.
Simply put – it offers a new API that allows to overlay graphics on a live video stream.
This is great news for Augmented reality (AR) browser applications such as Layar and Wikitude (for more examples see right side bar). Although similar applications have sneaked into the app store before – I am sure it’s great to finally be legit on the store.
However, 3.1 provides only semi support for AR apps.
When you want to align graphics with real world things (like markers or other objects) – you need to be able to analyze the live video stream off of the iPhone camera. This functionality is only available as a private API on the iPhone (even with 3.1). It’s technically possible, but Apple may not allow such an app on the App store.
By the way, when I say “support” I do not mean by any means that Apple provides AR capabilities on the iPhone. Some folks in the press got that impression from the flood of headlines announcing support for AR on the iPhone…
To clarify, AR companies still need to do the heavy lifting such as AR detection and tracking; bearing the ripe fruits of many years of research and development.
So AR is not yet totally legit on the iPhone. But we are getting closer.
The posts I like the most are about student projects. Luckily here’s another one.
A couple of students from the German research institute, the Fraunhofer Society created what they name “The Augmented Reality Flashlight”. Basically, it’s a micro-projector held as a flashlight to shed light (i.e. annotate) objects in your vicinity. Yep, projected AR is not dead after all.
So, what’s novel about this technique? After all, we all saw MIT’s Sixth Sense half a year ago. One of the students, Robert Brauer explains:
[the novelty is in] The metaphorical approach. The whole “flashlight” thing changes the style of working from the ergonomic perspective – which was our initial motivation.
In technical space I’d say that we concentrate going “pure pinky”. Based on the interaction technique there is no need for coloured finger caps. We try to work naturally on and furthermore with the object. Although we really like the MIT project, the finger caps are to us what the stylus was to mobile phones. Unnecessary and annoying.
You can read more details over Brauer’s blog. If you are a student that happen to work on an AR project, feel free to send me a mail, I’m just a few clicks away :)
Frankly, I got tired with AR browsers. When Wikitude first launched I was excited. When Layar came out the whole blogosphere was thrilled. But now (only a couple of months after Layar went public), I’m feeling quite jaded. Everybody and his sister are making an AR browser application, and most of them are just he same.
Apparently, I’m not the only one harboring those feelings. The title of this post is taken from a mail sent to me by Daniel Wagner of Graz University of Technology, one of the best known names in the field of mobile AR. Wagner writes:
Rather than inventing the next (10th?) AR browser, we’ve been working on generally improving the usability of such applications. My team member Alessandro [Mulloni] has come up with some cool gestures and good ideas on how to avoid information overflow and how to let people easier navigate in a typical AR browser scenario. The result is something like. “this is how an AR browser should actually be” – without restricting to a specific application scenario.
While AR in general is from a first person perspective, Mulloni looked into extending it with panoramic and bird’s-eye perspectives, in order to enhance the user’s understanding of its surrounding. This is how it looks:
In his paper, Mulloni finds that such smooth transition into other perspectives can really help the user. So, what do you say? A new avenue for AR browsers, or is the real conclusion from this research is that AR still needs to be complemented by a top-down map view in order to be usable?
ISMAR 2009 proudly announces the first Flash AR Contest sponsored by ARToolWorks. The contest is opened to anyone and is part of the inaugural Arts, Interactive Media and Humanities program for ISMAR 2009.
The best FLARToolKit submission wins $1000 USD.
(we know you’re in it just for the money)
Contest rules:
1. Develop a desktop-based AR application using FLARToolKit that can be run from a desktop PC (using no additional input devices other than a Camera, Keyboard, and Mouse).
2. Should be relevant for any subject of Arts, interactive Media or Humanities at ISMAR 2009
3. Submit as a zip file and its originality, style and potentially will be judged by a panel of experts during ISMAR 2009.
4. All the applications will be demonstrated on the ISMAR 2009 website and will be made available during ISMAR 2009 for the attendees.
5. The winner will be announced and awarded at the ISMAR 2009 dinner.
6. At the end of the competition, a selected range of applications will be made available on the ARToolWorks website
Start working – competition entries are due by 5pm PST, Friday October 9th!
Oh, there’s just too much to write about this week.
In the mobile AR front:
Nokia’s researcher Kari Pulli gave a talk last week at the SDForum about Nokia’s take on mobile augmented reality (slides). In a nutshell, it should be based on image recognition and accessed using HMD. And here are some more details from the Nokia World event that took part this week.
buUuk is an AR browser-like application for Asia, Australia and the middle east. [via DMFO]
While Presselite which brought us Metro Paris has an application for Tokyo that looks much the same.
And GeoVector, one of the veteran players in the AR industry is going to release an application for Android named WorldSurfer. They accidently published a post about it in their corporate blog (dated for next week) and then deleted it. Luckily, there’s Google Cache.
In the world of novelty AR advertisement:
You can check whether the new Samsung LED television fits your living room (which is actually a bit handy).
Here’s a silly video of augmented reality game of hangman from a company named HD interactive. It seems they want to sell it to the public. Tom Carpenter shares his opinion about this topic.
This week’s video comes from Vodafone, which had a lightly augmented version of the game of tag in the Netherlands for the launch of the HTC magic. More details can be found here.
Once again, it was another very prolific week for augmented reality, with a plethora of interesting posts and articles. For those of you who didn’t had a time to read them during the week and waited for the weekend to catch-up (like I did), here’s a short list of articles that may entertain you for the next hour. Don’t worry, the regular linkfest will be here tomorrow, with some more AR fun.
Augmented Reality in a Contact Lens
This was an extremely popular article this week, though, to tell you the truth, it has little to do with augmented reality, and more to do with the challenges facing engineers when creating electronic lenses embedded within contact lenses. However, if you want to peek to the far future, it’s an interesting read.
a contact lens with simple built-in electronics is already within reach; in fact, my students and I are already producing such devices in small numbers in my laboratory at the University of Washington, in Seattle [see sidebar, “A Twinkle in the Eye”]. These lenses don’t give us the vision of an eagle or the benefit of running subtitles on our surroundings yet. But we have built a lens with one LED, which we’ve powered wirelessly with RF. What we’ve done so far barely hints at what will soon be possible with this technology.
I am big on the notion of “Games and Goals.” I believe that games have the power to motivate people in a very powerful way. By challenging ourselves while playing a game we can climb mountains. Augmented Reality is the perfect platform to bring gaming into the real world. By mixing the virtual world with the physical world, this added layer of perception provides a very powerful experience for something like a role-playing game.
Thinking about design strategies for ‘magic lens’ AR
Gene Becker is a silicon valley veteran that has worked in the past for HP on an AR project named Cooltown. Lately he has written a couple of interesting posts concerning augmented reality, and in this one he discusses the challenges of designing a good and effective AR application for a mobile phone.
The idea of a magic lens is visually intuitive and emotionally evocative, and there is understandable excitement surrounding the rollout of commercial AR applications. These apps are really cool looking, and they invoke familiar visual tropes from video games, sci-fi movies, and comics. We know what Terminator vision is, we’re experienced with flight sim HUDs, and we know how a speech balloon works. These are common, everyday forms of magical design fiction that we take for granted in popular culture.
And that’s going to be the biggest challenge for this kind of mobile augmented reality; we already know what a magic lens does, and our expectations are set impossibly high.
Proposal: Augmented Reality Scale
Thomas Carpenter of “The Future Digital Life” propose in this article a metric that enables us to compare AR applications and measure the intensity in which they augment our reality. Although a similar idea was brought up a few months ago by the guys at SPRXMobile (creators of Layar), Carpenter’s take is easier to understand and implement.
The RIM scale will be composed of two axis: Perceived Reality (PR) and Reality Recognition (RR). I chose two axis because AR exists through the mixing of reality and the virtual. First I’ll explain the two axis, then the interaction between them.
…
The Perceived Reality axis shows us how the graphics are indistinguishable from reality (on a scale from one to ten).
…
The Reality Recognition axis explains how completely computers understand the world (on a scale of one to ten).
Lumus from the Humus Land: the Future of Augmented Reality Displays
Ori Inbar interviews Zvi Lapidot, the CEO of Lumus, an Israeli company set to provide not-as-dorky looking glasses that can display digital video overlaid on top of reality. I actually tried one of their prototypes a couple of months ago and felt quite like a dork, but I guess they look cooler than those of main competitor Vuzix.
Ori: That’s impressive. And how did you enable AR tracking?
Zvi: By collaborating with AR specialists and Chinese partners we integrated a web camera and a compass (with 3DOF) into the prototype; and connected it to a phone with GPS. AR algorithms analyzed the video from the camera and overlaid graphics while tracking the real world. Several units of the prototype were even so
And finally, although technically this interview was held last week, I haven’t found about it till yesterday. Here is Robert Rice preaching his sermon, and discussing many other interesting AR subjects with John C. Havens on BlogTalkRadio, though you may want to wait till your Monday’s commute to listen to it, as it’s quite long.
Augmented reality and Twitter. Both are currently hyped as game changers, regardless of their current impact on the world. We have covered in the past some AR applications that brought tweets to the real world (e.g. Twittaround, Cloud Mirror and Squidder’s augmented T-shirts).
This time around, it’s time to cover the augmented reality scene in Twitter, starting with some recommended accounts to follow. Please note that this list is far from comprehensive, so feel free to leave your favorite twitters in the comment sections. Moreover I’ll try to to make this a reoccurring feature over here, so in the long run we’ll have a pretty thorough directory of interesting augmented reality twitter accounts.
@Comogard – Ori Inbar’s account, has the best signal to noise ratio, since it’s dedicated to AR.
@RobertRice – Neogence‘s CEO and “AR philosopher”. Though augmented reality is not the only topic Rice tweets about (lots of politics and some sports), he is one of the most interesting accounts you can follow, having an inspiring yet grounded vision of AR.
@twitt_ar – Danika is an intern at Metaio, and a valuable resource for AR related news.
@TishShute – Not only does Tish Shute interviews the industry’s leaders over UgoTrade, she’s also has an active AR twitter that is worth the follow.
@noazark – Follow Noah Zerkin if you are interested in some “Mad Scientist” perspective on augmented reality, as he single handedly builds an AR glove.
@iguchi – Takahito Iguchi is the CEO of Tonchidot, makers of Sekai Camera. Though most of his tweets are in Japanese he is very tuned to augmented reality and mobile innovation and features some interesting links.
@augmented – That’s me! (at least my Twitter account that is dedicated to AR). I regularly post there links to interesting articles and videos that I find and don’t have the time to cover on this blog.
Next time, mobile augmented reality on twitter, till then, have a pleasent weekend!
Really, Why do people get excited about augmented reality ?
I was stumped by this question in an interview for the NY Times and my first reaction was: duh! ’cause it’s friggin’ awesome!
But when you think about it, people get excited about Augmented Reality because…because they never thought it’d actually become possible…
Science Fiction has been a major part of our culture for generations and is ingrained in our belief system. Even non Sci-Fi geeks, are familiar with concepts such as teleporting, time travel, or X-ray vision.
We were led to believe these things are “Fiction” and impossible in real life.
Well, up until augmented reality has demonstrated otherwise.
Teleporting
Reducing business travel is not only good for the environment; it’s also great for humans. However teleconferencing systems haven’t been able to reproduce the immediacy and intimacy of multiple people actually occupying the same room.
With AR – realtime holograms are possible and teleporting is a snap.
Just like when MR. Rabbit Visits Barcelona in Vernor Vinge’s Rainbows End:
IN DOWNTOWN BARCELONA, three days later:
The rabbit hopped onto the unoccupied wicker chair and thence to the middle of the table, between the teacups and the condiments. It tipped its hat forst at Alfred Vaz and then at Gunberk Braun and Keiko Mitsuri. “Have I got a deal for you!” it said. Altogether, it was an unremarkable example of its type.
Alfred reached out and swiped his hand through the image, just to emphasize his own substance. “We’re the ones with the deal”….
Braun was as ephemeral as the rabbit, but he projected a dour earnestness that was quite consistent with his real personality.
…or as illustrated perfectly in this tongue and cheek video:
OK, we can’t REALLY time travel with AR, but we can certainly see how things looked like in the past, or places will look like in the future. We can experience that reality around us from a first person view.
Larry Niven described such a fascinating scene in Dream Park back in 1981:
“Please stay on the green path,” the soft, well-modulated male voice requested. “What green-” Tony started to say. But a glowing green aisle ten feet across appearred in the middle of the street.
“We need strong magic to do what we do today,” the voice continued. “We are going to visit the old Los Angeles that disappeared in May of 1985. As long as you stay on the path, you should be perfectly safe.”
…”This is the Los Angeles of 2051″ the voice continued, “but only a few hundred feet from here begins another world, one seldom seen by human eyes.”
A banner blocked Wileshir Boulevard. Thegreen path humped and carried them over it. Beyond lay ruin. Buildings balanced precariously on rotted and twisted beams, The were old, of archaic styles, and seawater lapped at their foundations.
Ollie nudged Gwen, his face aglow. “Will you look at that?” It was a flooded parking lot, ancient automibiles half covered with water. “That looks like a Mercedes. Did you ever see what they looked like before they merged with Toyota?”
Here is a (tiny) contemporary proof that it’s not only possible in sci-fi books:
Last year’s Android Developer Challenge brought us such augmented reality applications as Wikitude and Enkin (which, until I’m proven wrong, is the first AR vaporware).
This time around, we are likely to see a surge in the number of AR applications participating in the challenge. An early bird, geoPaste, is coming to us all the way from Australia.
As can be seen in the video above, geoPaste lets you annotate reality right through your mobile phone, by sketching little pictures (or loading previously created images). Developer Gary Silva is concentrating at the moment on winning the challenge, but he has a grand vision for his app, “to make AR publishing available to everybody”.
After ADC1 I had also seen a Wikitude demo and saw their slant towards providing AR content for consumers, like Enkin ( and which Layar now continues ). From there I thought that AR publishing could be put directly into the hands of end users and was inspired to start working on geoPaste to try to realize that vision. My original thoughts were along the lines of digital graffiti, legal and harmless but at the same time indelible, hence my drawings metaphor.
Good luck on the challenge!
More details, over here.
Games Alfresco 