Live From NYC – Part II: Augmented Reality Developer Camp

Posted on December 7, 2009 by Ori Inbar

If you missed our coverage of the morning – read part I.

Rain turned into snow and a ground breaking discussion was kicked off:

Yours truly proposed an open collaborative game development project: The Big NYC Game – a city wide augmented reality game for New York by New Yorkers.

It would be launched by 2010 June’s Come Out and Play Festival.

Everybody was on board and the ideas kept flowing into the room faster than you could spell: ARDEVCAMPNYC. Wow what a great team!

The discussion consisted of multiple layers:

From technical considerations (what AR engines and devices to use?)

…thru game concepts (learning about AR, teaching how to build AR games)

…and game play (Easter eggs, capture the flag, learn about NYC history)

…and even government relations and promotional activities with local businesses.

Here is a set of slides I captured during the discussion.

If you like the idea and want to join – let us know!

Tish captured the rest of the sessions and took many pictures which can be found on her blog UgoTrade.

Sophia (the organizer of the day) added a quick summary and reference for follow ups.

And if you are wondering what happened at the (bigger) sister event on the left coast (HackerDojo in Mountain View) – here are some snippets:

Mike Libehold (IFTF) summarized the event with these words:

Turnout  for the 12 hour ARdevcamp  at the Hacker dojo was mind boggling. I estimated that at peak, 130-140  people were in and out of the space more comfortable for 70-80.

it was a  barely disciplined massively parallel and fun! dialog  (and party) in 40 discrete sessions, mostly technical and social, with exponentially complex interactions in between all day into evening. We asked everyone to log their session notes on the ardevcap wiki, but the huge crowd flooded the meager DSL connection  from the building, complained they couldn’t post pages.  I haven’t had a chance to explore,  or inspect damages yet.

The mass of expert devcampers  was simply astounding  and uniformly brilliant hackers, mobile techies, mappers,image recognition scientists, 3D, artists, media designers, nav, techies, game designers, a  teacher  a museum guy . . .

The dialog was multi-disciplinary, definitely friendly towards, but not closely focused yet  specifically on  an open ARweb, data interoperability, software and service ecosytems, APIs, rendering and UI conventions. I suspect all of these were discussed in some depth, but but not yet logged.

David Cheney summary of the day

Summary of AR and art session

More Photos

AR is certainly gearing up to start 2010 with a bang!

Next event in NYC is the Augmented Reality New York Meetup – ARNY. Join today!

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Live from NYC: Augmented Reality Dev Camp

Posted on December 5, 2009 by Ori Inbar

On a rainy Saturday morning, the Canal strip is already busy. Just a block away, a group of passionate (how else would you explain the Sat morning meetup) techies are hauling up  the elevator to Topp’s Penthouse – The Open Planning Project. The coolest work place I have ever seen.

About 20 people are in the room + 10 on Skype (from Europe and the US)
In the spirit of unconference – all the rules are broken in the first 5 minutes…the day is kicked off with a session about PyGo Wave and a discussion about using Google wave (XMPP protocol) for distributed Augmented Reality.

Welcome to the NYC AR Dev Camp. In a few hours a parallel session will start on the left coast in Mountain View.

Next is introductions of the passionistas on location:

Sophia Parafina – Open GEO (and the organizer of the event – thanks!)

Tish Shute – UgoTrade blog + Using Google Wave for distributed AR on the internet
Omer Gunes From NYU MLP –
Steven Feiner –  Columbia Professor for the AR lab
Don Schwartz – Demystifying tech, virtual worlds
Name – Local search, social search
Kate Chapman – web developer FortiusOne
Dimitri Darras – web dev
Ohan Oda – PHd from Columbia – Goblin XNA
Sean White – Columbia, Smithsonian institution
Ori Inbar – Games alfresco author, Founder of Ogmento – maker of AR games.
Dan Leslie – web consulting reflections delta: will launch a loc based social graph analysis tool (iPhone)
MZ – startup to develop a platform to use semantic data to enable virtual worlds
Jon Russek – film production + law + internet. Interested in AR as artistic medium for creativity
Bert Picot – entrepreneur – live entertainment ticketing. learn about AR
Steven Henderson – Columbia – AR for procedural applications
Matthew Pierce – a writer – interested in user experience

Davide Byron – developed the game Spads and Fokkers and code
Chris Grayson – Web developer and marketing consultant
Marco Neumann – KONA
Noah Zerkin – The inventor of the Zerkin glove

Who have I missed?

What shall we talk about?

Sean White volunteers to moderate the discussion, and collcts these topics on the board:
-egalitarian usage – relevance of AR to small businesses
-limitations of mobile devices (handsets) – how to overcome limitations in the near-mid term
-open marker system (database) to be implemented for global use (what role RFID might play?)
-what about voice recognition as input – multimodal (ARXML voice protocol?)
-computer infrastructure for sensor fusion (current apps only use limited sets of sensors) blue tooth?
-create a sound map based on a picture?
(Sean mentions an iphone app for hearing impaired)
-revenue models ?
-use AR for advertising, enhancing existing tech and business models
-Big NY game (location based, social, AR game built for NYC by New Yorkers!)
-where does AR meet traditional motion tracking?
-natural feature tracking
-intersection of AR and semantic web – using AR as basis for formal models on the web
-patent land mines? (GEOVector)

Lots of great topics. Sean proposes to group them into 4 categories and have a vote:

1) Business

2) Standards

3) Tech

4) Apps and games

Surprisingly, business and Apps get the most votes!

Now we are off to a lunch break (Denno Coil playing on the screen). Will continue after the break.

To get a sense how cool this location is – checkout this video (courtesy of Sean White)

Ohan Oda presents “his baby” from Columbia university: Goblin XNA a development tool for AR games based on the Microsoft XNA game development environment. See more info.

Questions range the gamut from -” what does it run on?” (anything as long as it’s a Microsoft platform…) to “how much can it be customized?” (practically anything – it’s open source!)

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