The last week of 2009 was quite a slow one, and having Thomas K. Carpenter join Games Alfresco, diminishes my list of resources even further. Nevertheless, here are some AR related news-bits that we haven’t covered this week:
Just before moving to Games Alfresco, Thomas had the most exquisite, well researched review of 2009 in AR.
Augmented Planet on EyePly that are set to augment sport venues.
One niche of AR browsers that’s getting crowded very fast, is ski-related browsers. Resort Technology Partners’ REALSKI is yet another of this kind with a neat business plan – each mountain map costs you another 99 cents.
If you are living in Copenhagen, you can use Layar to see air pollution readings around you.
Now, if I get it right, Soho is a men magazine from Colombia that employed AR to boost its sales. Which is one step closer to my prediction about Playboy getting augmented. (via Design Memo for Ourselves)
This is the last linkfest for this year. Though there were many more Christmas spectacles this week, I’m going to keep this linkfest holiday-spirit free (broke my nose, not feeling very festive).
Robert Rice on 2010, the first year in the decade of ubiquity – “The point though, is that all of these things calling themselves augmented reality now are just the start. Everyone is getting their feet wet, experimenting, exploring, and beginning to innovate. We can argue about what is or isn’t augmented reality, but it doesn’t really matter. What does matter is the continual push for advancing the technology, the industry, and getting people to start using it“.
On the same theme, Edo Segal writes for Techcrunch about the dawn of ambient streams – “Increasingly, we will be sensing the world with this sixth sense and that will change the way we collectively experience the world. Going back to the point made earlier, the watershed event is when we will be experiencing this “ambient sense” without being in a retrieval mode (i.e. not when we go to the computer or our mobile device“
Whisper Deck is a cool voice operated AR interface
Point your sneakers to your webcam in order to feel silly. Which should be on Mashable’s 10 awesome uses of AR in marketing list (what, only one car campaign? seriously, where’s that GE ad that started the fad?)
This week’s video is of a projected AR system coming to us from the University of Magdeburg, Germany. Though we have seen quite a few systems like that over the past years (even one coming out from Microsoft), I don’t think we have seen any as slick as that. You can read how it works (magic! infra-red markers) at New Scientist (via Augmented Engineering).
Games Alfresco 