11 Industries to be Reinvented with Augmented Reality

Posted on May 6, 2009 by Ori Inbar

We have been raving about how Augmented Reality will reinvent reality. Which slices of “reality” will be affected by AR first? Researchers and entrepreneurs worldwide are already plotting its impact on specific industries.

Investors – here’s a chance to educate yourselves.

Here are 11 of my favorite clips depicting industries reinvented with augmented reality:
(Credits inside the videos)

1. Advertising

Despite being the first on the ar band wagon, the $600 Trillion ad industry has used AR as a gimmick. It has the potential to literally bring consumers to products and totally reinvent itself.

2. Art

Street art democratized minus the vandalism.

Here is another fantastic example – a free form street art.

Vodpod videos no longer available.

3. Design

Real-collaboration, real-time, real-life design

4. Entertainment

Entertainment content could reach you in every part of your day AND be relevant to your surroundings.

5. Health care

Doctors: you have the information – now use it in context of your patient.

6. Learning

Books reinvented. Gutenberg must be turning in his grave.

7. Maintenance

See through walls, floors and roofs? awesome dude – I wanna be in maintenance!

8. Personal Productivity

No more being glued to a screen. No more screens. No more (visible) hardware.

9. Retail

Stores and products talk to you about themselves (but only when you want…)

And from the consumer perspective – shopping will be reinvented

10. Tourism

Your personal tourist guide, anywhere you go.

11. Training

User manuals are dead. Watch the instructions live in your field of view.

What industry would you like to reinvent?

Filed under: AR Vision | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 8 Comments »

GDC 2009 Roundup: a (tiny) spark of augmented reality

Posted on May 4, 2009 by Ori Inbar

The dust over GDC 2009 has settled a while ago and finally I got to reflect on the AR experience at the show.  Guess which headline would summarize it best:

a) augmented reality was the talk of the show

b) the expo floor was swarming with AR demos

c) AR games snatched lucrative game awards

d) none of the above

dsc03400

A friend in San Francisco wearing retro AR goggles

Unfortunately (d) is the right answer.

But – and it’s a big ‘but’ – the ignition spark was there. The seed was planted. The first shot of the revolution was fired.

(OK, maybe the last metaphor went too far.)

Here are 5 triggers I identified that ignited the spark:

1) Blair

The first GDC augmented reality talk – ever: Blair MacIntyre covered the latest and greatest about mobile augmented reality in front of a packed room of game developers. Awesome.

2) Demos

Was it the first time AR demos (and more demos) were presented at a major Game Developer Conference ?

Not sure – but it certainly was my first…

3)  Mentions in talks

Was Blair’s AR talk an isolated case?

Perhaps as a main topic it was. However, for the first time, I heard significant mentions of AR in multiple other talks. Check them out:

A talk about pervasive gaming. I liked the title: “Beyond the Screen: Principles of Pervasive Game” by the folks from Pervasive Games. The played with the concept in which the whole world is the playground.  These games, are founded in the belief that doing things for real is pleasurable. Games that harness reality as a source book have interesting dynamics.  Everything in reality matters to the game, the game play emerges from coincidence, and real and artificial blur.

Jane McGonigal fantastic talk “Learning to Make Your Own Reality: How to Develop Games that Re-invent Life As We Know It” introduced a concept she calls programmable reality. Augmented reality is among the key technologies to enable that idea.

Camera Based Gaming: The Next Generation by Diarmid Campbell attracted the attention of a room packed with game developers. He talked about Sony’s upcoming camera games for the PlayStation 3 such as Eye Pet. Armed with the EyeToy camera, these games will have the power to extract amusing gestures from players. Not quite AR – but sure smells like it.

Stretching Beyond entertainment – AR made a surprise appearance in a high profile panel discussion feturing some of the gods of the gaming industry: (from right) Ed Fries , Lorne Lanning,Bing Gordon,Will Wright, and Peter Molyneux.
The best quote award went to Ed Fries for saying: “We need to take game mechanics and apply them to the real world”.

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4) Meet ups

Dinners, lunches, business meetups, brainstorming sessions – haven’t had that many meetings with AR enthusiasts since ISMAR 2008…

5) The iPhone

When it comes to bringing AR to the masses – the iPhone is a category on its own . And it doesn’t even know it yet…why the iPhone changed everything

-*-*-

Will we ever get to see answers a, b, or c become a real headline?

Most likely in the next few years, if you ask me.

A (tiny) spark was ignited.

Filed under: AR Events, AR Games, AR Tracking, AR User Experience | Tagged: , , , , , , , , | 9 Comments »

Weekly Linkfest

Posted on May 3, 2009 by rouli

That was quite a week for augmented reality.
The top article at Games Alfresco was “Augmented Fear of Heights” (with about 1000 views!), and on Augmented Times the top post was about Marco Tempest’s magic Trick.

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):

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:

Have a nice week!

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More Augmented Advertisement

Posted on May 2, 2009 by rouli

Our friend Diego Gopen has notified us that his augmented advertisements service, ARvertising.com, has a new demo, one that lets you play augmented dice online:

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.

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Augmented Fear of Heights

Posted on April 30, 2009 by rouli

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.

More details here.

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Feel Unease with Cloud Mirror

Posted on April 29, 2009 by rouli

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)

Filed under: Uncategorized | 1 Comment »

Augmented Comedy

Posted on April 27, 2009 by rouli

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”:

Filed under: Uncategorized | 13 Comments »

Weekly Linkfest

Posted on April 26, 2009 by rouli

It’s time again for another weekly linkfest, but first, let’s take a moment to a recognize a historic event. This is the 100th post here at Games Alfresco. Last week featured this blog’s 500th comment. Let’s hope that by the 200th post, AR will take a more substantial part in our life.

Now, without any further ado, here are some other AR news from around the web:

  • Enter the mind of Ronald Chevalier, an experience that promotes this film.
  • Georgia Tech’s has a new infomercial for their mixed reality design class.
  • Study finds that when it comes to in-car navigation, augmented reality is better than 3D egocentric view aids (such as plain old GPS devices). Who could have guessed?
  • Geocaching using augmented reality is such a neat idea, I’m surprised no one before Jacob at Trimagination thought about it.
  • Looking for an AR primer? Rusty Henderson has one covering the basics (with many videos), and Tom Carpenter has some more details.

The quote of the week comes from Robert Rice’s twitter feed:

My team has figured out how to build most of Rainbows End. Just matter of time and funding now… /evil scientist cackle/

I guess that if they really achieved that feat, funding will not be a problem.

And finally, the weekly video comes from GeoVector (which I previouslly covered here). It’s a concept video from 1995 and contains some interesting ideas. It just shows that even

if you think that you have a novel idea, someone has thought about it before. Jump to 4:51 for a really cool augmented frogger:

Have a nice week!

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ARiS in Book Format

Posted on April 24, 2009 by rouli

Geisha Tokyo Entertainment’s ARiS, the augmented reality maid featured in the clip above that Ori covered here, is on her way to become the first virtual AR celebrity. No only does she appear in primetime tv, she now got her own book deal.
The new “official guide book“, is 64 pages of ARiS goodness. It features ARiS’s secret till now biography, tips and tricks, her development process and an interview with her voice actor. Apparently, also included are some markers for ARiS’s living room and shower so after buying the book she will no longer need to live on your desk. You can see a video of her new rooms at the book’s site.

Alas, you can order the book only if you live in Japan. It will be available starting from early June. Via CScout Japan, where you can find some more details and pictures.

Filed under: AR Games | 3 Comments »

Weekly Linkfest and Site News

Posted on April 20, 2009 by rouli

Hi all!

My name is Rouli (pronounced like wooly) . For the last couple of months, I’ve been blogging on augmented reality over at Augmented Times, where I cover the coming “AR revolution”. When I first became an AR enthusiast, over a year ago, I’ve found Games Alfresco an incredible source of goodness. That’s why I was honored when Ori approached me with an offer to combine forces, in hopes of creating a central AR hub, a place for AR fans and proffesionals alike.
This post is the first step in creating such a hub, and in the following weeks I’ll be publishing some of my posts both over here and on Augmented Times. Please leave a comment and tell us what you think about this collaboration!

Once a week I write a post detailing all the news that didn’t get their own post, a “Linkfest”. So, for the first time on Games Alfresco, here’s this week’s linkfest:

Finally, the following video was doing the rounds this last week –

It’s iVisit‘s SeeScan, an application under development for Windows Mobile that intends to help the visually impaired, but could have other uses for AR (a bit more information here).

Filed under: Uncategorized | 5 Comments »

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