The Augmented Environments lab at Georgia Tech (AELatGT) has recently uploaded to Youtube videos showing off many games developed as projects in the “HAR: AR Game Design Studio” class last year. Blair MacIntyre‘s students came up with some interesting ideas (some would say unconventional), but in my view, there’s one clear winner –
Candy Wars is a physics oriented game, played with your fridge magnets, where the goal is to feed a frog until it explodes. Things couldn’t be better:
Many more video goodies can be found on AELatGT’s Youtube page. Just a little tip – don’t be tempted by the name, GuitAR hero, is nothing more than a rickroll in AR disguise.
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):
An interesting article at SPRXMobile’s blog (creators of the ATM finder), looking at the augmented reality hype cycle. I had some reservations about the way Maarten’s divided the different AR applications to generations (as you can read in the comments section), so I may write my own take about it soon.
An excellent presentation given by Thomas Purves at Refresh Events – “Designing for an augmented reality world“, where he covers some technological and sociological aspects of AR.
Advertising Age 2 – the rebuttal: “Augmented reality has huge promise, but in the short term it’s a niche technology for a niche audience. … Let’s just hope our desire to hype it AR as the next big thing won’t harm it. “(Augmented Reality: Can the ‘Stars Wars’ Effect Sustain Engagement?)
The new Star Trek movie has some AR in its ARG (but I don’t really CARE).
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:
An important message from Mark Billinghurst about ArToolKit:hirokazu
On Tuesday March 17th, Hirokazu Kato recevied the 2009 IEEE VGTC
Virtual Reality Technical Achievement Award for his development of the
ARToolKit tracking library. This was given at the IEEE VR 2009
conference, the premier academic conference for virtual reality. The
VR Technical Achievement Award is a great honor and has only been
given out five times before, to such people as the inventors of the
CAVE immersive VR system.
For Hirokazu Kato this is well deserved because, although it was
developed ten years ago, ARToolKit is still the dominant computer
vision based AR tracking library with over 170,000 downloads. Almost
all of the researchers in the AR field have used ARToolKit in one way
or other, and many of the AR applications in the field have roots that
can be traced back to ARToolKit. As a result of his work, AR
researchers and developers didn’t need to build tracking code, but
instead could focus on AR application development and interface
design. The community owes a huge debt of gratitude to Hiro and it’s
great to see that his achievement has been recognized.
Basically it means that companies can now get commercial licenses to FLARToolKit and build flash based Augmented reality websites without having to release their source code as required by the GPL license.
Saqoosha (Tomohiko Koyama) was the first to marry AR with flash as open source – a major step in simplifying AR apps on a PC. Now ARToolworks CTO, Philip Lamb, is taking it to a commercial level.
This emerging technology is on a 15-plus-year-long journey from the lab and into the mainstream. With too many events to list, 2008 marks an important year in that quest.
Here is the countdown of the top 10 most important AR milestones of 2008:
10) Otellini’s CES keynote showcases AR technology
The year started with the largest consumer electronics show CES. Total Immersion’s demo had the attention of the entire consumer electronics community during Otellini’s (Intel CEO) 2008 keynote.
9) Video game gurus recognize AR as the future of gaming
My personal idol in the game industry, Will Wright, delivered the best augmented reality quote of the year. When describing AR as the way of the future for games, he explained:
Games could increase our awareness of our immediate environment, rather than distract us from it”.
Futurist Bruce Sterling made controversial statements about games in 2043 in front of a developer only audience in the Austin Game Developer Conference . Here is one statement that stood above all:
“What do the games of 2043 look like? “I think you would call [them] ‘augmented reality’”
8) ISMAR 2008
The world’s most important augmented reality event, ISMAR 2008, was more significant than ever. It demonstrated, above all, the level of maturity AR research has reached.
It might not be the best AR device but it certainly has the most buzz. In 2008, the iPhone was highly sought after by game developers and researchers. The App store which amassed 10,000 apps in half a year, offers an instant distribution model for AR games. In 2008, the iPhone was the gadget to beat.
Ghostwire may or may not be the first AR game to win a game award. But, 2008 was certainly the first year were 6 out 0f top 10 games were selected as finalists in game awards such as Nokia’s Mobile Innovation Challenge.
One AR game did not win any awards this year, but was certainly an audience favorite (the most hits): Cyber Figure Alice – the first adult only AR game.
The AR market picked up steam in 2008 with high visibility deals such as Total Immersion’s with Six Flags (“magically superimpose clown masks on riders” as their waiting for the Dark Night ride) and Metaio (book deals with publishers ArsEdition and Knowledge Media). Metaio also scored a lucrative advertising contract to promote the MINI.
What, in your opinion, was the most significant augmented reality milestone in 2008?
So far we have looked at demos of augmented reality gameplay and investigated preferred hardware devices. That was just the warm up. Now we’re getting into the real beef: who offers the best software engine that can augment our reality (and our spirits)? Who will spearhead the creation of a totally new gaming experience?
Games alfresco brings you the unofficial roundup of the top 10 best augmented reality engines.
We will look at one engine at a time (enough with these looong posts!) and at the end of the round up, will rank them based on the feedback from you, the community. This is collaborative work in progress of group of passionate contributors on facebook. If you want to take part of the fun, join us at: augmented reality games.
Here is a sneak peak at some of the engines that we may or may not review:
Games Alfresco 