4 years at ARNY: Augmented Reality meetup celebrates 1500 members, 200 demos, new startups.

I founded the Augmented Reality New York meetup (ARNY) exactly 4 years ago as a labor of love, and it developed a life of it’s own: attracting nearly 1500 members, introducing 200 Augmented Reality demos, helping advance AR in NYC, creating partnerships, helping AR enthusiasts find jobs, and spurring some fantastic AR startups.

How did we celebrate last night’s ARNY?

With a fantastic collections of speakers and demos from all over the world: Israel, Canada, Columbia and New York City.

Huge shout out for our wonderful host Mark Skwarek at NYU Poly!

1) Brendan Scully – Metaio – first ever SLAM demo on Google glass from the Augmented Reality Company

2) Niv Borenstein – Kazooloo – A truly fun to play Augmented Reality game-toy combination

3) Keiichi Matsuda – Hyper-Reality – A new vision for the future with plenty of Augmented Reality goodness. Back him on Kickstarter!

4) Dhan Balachand – Founder and CEO, Sulon Technologies – a new head mounted console that will fully immerse players into games where the real world and the virtual world become one.

5) Ori Inbar – The latest and greatest from around the world of augmented reality

AR on Sony Playstation 4 featuring Augmented Reality on mainstream TV

MIT Tangible Interfaces: inForm – Interacting with a dynamic shape display

8Tree – fastCHECK is a revolutionary surface inspection system that is amazingly easy to use combining a laser scanner with a projector to help inspect aircrafts.

2013 DEMO Gods winner review – Pristine – Delivering the next generation of telemedicine and process control solutions at the point of care through Google Glass.

Moto X box opening AR experience – Augmenting paper popup for story telling

One Fat Sheep’s Hell Pizza Zombie game (New Zealand)

TWNKLS cool Augmented Reality SLAM demo  for maintenance and repair at Europort

Re+Public new AR mural app – resurrecting murals with Augmented Reality

https://vimeo.com/77516545

Nikola Tesla app IndieGoGo launch by Brian Yetzer

https://vimeo.com/80143324

Stay tuned for a full video of the entire event

A Brief Interview with Ori

Have you ever heard of this guy? A brief interview from Geoweb Forum with Ori Inbar.  In it he talks about ARE2010, ARNY, the state of the industry and a gives a brief demonstration of Put A Spell.

Magic, Games, Education, and Live Coding at the Augmented Reality Meetup in NYC

Magic, games, education, even live AR coding – we had it all last night at the Augmented Reality Meetup NY (or as we fondly like to call it ARNY.)

51 AR enthusiasts showed up in an amazing location (Thanks Sophia!) – out of 211 registered members – but who’s counting…we are all about quality ;) What I like about this group is that it represents all walks of life: developers, gamers, attorneys, artists, journalists, magicians, even a police officer!

ARNY’s purpose is to help advance the business of Augmented Reality, by bringing together the best of AR with the best talent in NYC. And have fun while at it.

Thanks to Chris Grayson, the “revolution” was “televised” (aka live streamed)

In case you want to remotely take part in this meetup, or any other AR meetup around the world – there is a site for that: ARmeetup.org. (Last night wasn’t recorded due to a Ustream glitch)

Yours truly kicked off the evening with a recount of AR at GDC by the Numbers. Sony Move was the most exciting AR news at GDC.

Then, a fantastic lineup of speakers took the stage:

1) Alejandro Echeverría – Student at Engineering School in Chile, who came all the way from Chile just to be with us (seriously he’s a visiting student at NYU) – presented Games for learning with AR. I loved the simple yet memorable approach to use movement and augmented reality to teach kids about electricity.

2) Patrick O’Shaughnessey – Patched Reality – FLAR in Five: building a FLAR app “from scratch” (mostly) in five minutes. Patrick which is one of the most experienced AR developers out there received the bravery medal of the evening for demostrating live coding!

The feature presentation of the evening was next:

The man you’ve all been waiting for. He’s been traveling all over the world, blowing people’s mind with his AR magic show – and today he’s here, live at ARNY. Ladies and gentleman please welcome – Marco Tempest!

3) Marco Tempest – The highly anticipated Augmented Reality magician brought the house down.

See a live account of the show, along with a rare explanation of how it all works – in the video below:

4) Ohan Oda – Archemist – Augmented Reality Game with Goblin XNA

Last on on the program was another kind of magician, returning fresh from a demo at the game developer conference in San Francisco; he’s known for Goblin XNA – a development framework for AR applications for the Windows platform, and an avid AR game developer. This time, Ohan demonstrated his latest gravity-based AR game using Vuzix Goggles: Arble.

Here’s a video of a previous game with a similar mechanic.

UPDATE: Here’s a live video by ARNY member David Polinchock.

Next was my favorite part – high energy conversations in smaller teams. That’s where the true magic happens. Free beer courtesy of Topp didn’t hurt at all; the discussions went on late into the night.

UPDATE: Check out live commentary by AR aficionado Dan Romescu – all the way from Germany.

But wait, there is more!

Have you registered to the Augmented Reality Event (ARE 2010 in 2-3 June, 2010 – Santa Clara, CA)?

You are in luck.

Here is a discount code for the first 100 folks to register to the event (before the end of March). Go to the registration page, type in code AR245 and you’ll be asked to pay only $245 for 2 full days of AR goodness.

Watching AR prophet Bruce Sterling, and gaming legend Will Wright deliver keynotes for this price – is a magnificent steal. And on top, participating in more than 30 talks by AR industry leaders will turn these $254 into your best investment of the year ;)

Augmented Reality Panel at Web 2.0 Expo and Explosion in AR Meetups

Don’t you love going to conferences that take place in your home town?
And how about being invited to talk about your #1 passion?

Double awesome.

Last November, I was lucky enough to participate in a panel about augmented reality at the Web 2.0 Expo. (In all fairness, it was part of Web2Open co-located with Web 2.0)

The fun actually started the night before at a meetup organized by John Havens which was a great warm up for the real deal.

John also moderated the panel which included the following participants:

Robert Rice, CEO of Neogence delivered as usual a great intro to augmented reality and explained the virtues of the AR Consortium;

Jack Mason (Global Business Services, Strategic Programs and Social Media at IBM)
opened our eyes to the possibilities (and concerns) revolving around AR;

Lynne d Johnson, SVP Social Media at the Advertising Research Foundation and host of the NYC Android Developer’s Meetup showed off the latest AR rage embodied in this week’s Esquire Magazine: the augmented reality issue;

Erik Manley: Manager, Digital Media at GE and Michael Eisenreich: Technology Leader for GE’s company-wide Internet presence – proudly presented what I describe as the first high production augmented reality campaign ever. It’s probably one of the key reasons AR went off the charts on Google trends in the first quarter of the year.

Matt Szymczyk, CEO of Zugara, demonstrated Fashionista, a virtual dressing room his company just launched with Rich Relevance. Who says AR is just a novelty? This is a very Cool and practical use of augmented reality on webcams.

Marco Neumann, CEO and Founder of KONA, and the Organizer for New York Semantic web meet up gave the…semantic web back story behind augmented reality. 

All great guys and gals, enthusiastic about augmented reality, and…doing something about it.

Yours truly gave a little schpiel about Ogmento and demonstrated the upcoming (currently in beta) learning game for the iPhone: Put A Spell Learn to Spell with Augmented Reality.

Here is a video of my 100 slides under 5 minutes intro (seriously):

The crowed was not huge but very engaged. In the spirit of the web2Open unconference most of the interesting discussions happened afterwards.

We will be back at Porter Novelli’s office (Thanks John for hosting once again!) for the upcoming Augmented Reality NY (ARNY) meetup this Tuesday, featuring an amazing line up of speakers and demos:
1) John Swords – Circ.us – his latest AR game developed for Cisco Systems

2) Ryan CharlesZagat– New Augmented Reality view integrated into Zagat’s flagship restaurant rating and review app, Zagat To Go

3) Noora GuldemondMetaio – LEGO application and mobile markerless tracking

4) Dana Farbo – President of Acrossair – will present the fresh new Acrossair AR Browser

5) Craig Kapp – NYU – Whisper Deck – will introduce an experimental interface to access information using AR

These days, AR Meetups are all the rage – sprouting like mushrooms around the globe: From Los Angeles, to Palo Alto, Chicago, Raleigh, Toronto,  London, Manchester, Switzerland, and all the way to New Zealand). Here’s a big shout out to all our friends around the world – and thanks to Chris Grayson – we now have a live stream channel for all AR meetups – so you can participate in real time from the comfort of your home!
(though it’s much more fun being there in person)