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

Posted on January 18, 2010 by Ori Inbar

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 Charles – Zagat– New Augmented Reality view integrated into Zagat’s flagship restaurant rating and review app, Zagat To Go

3) Noora Guldemond – Metaio – 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)

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