before I fall to sleep, here’s a very short video illustrating Minecraft brought to the real world using augmented reality (more specifically, using Kudan’s Qoncept engine).
Metaio and Ericsson are optimizing tracking capabilities in the Mobile World Congress.
Route 66: A new twist on augmented reality navigation aid – you just need to follow the virtual car ahead of you.
AC130 is an AR shooting game that uses dollar bills as markers. What was once an innovative idea, is quickly becoming a standard.
This week’s video is a neat meshup between the insanely successful indie computer game Minecraft and augmented reality, by one Scott Kronick (or at least I think that is his name). Kronick, an artist by trade, came to the realization that it would be great “to hack away at and modify your city or school made of cubes”. The result is “RealCraft”:
MixAR, an augmented reality edtior for the iPhone is looking for your support on kickstarter.
“Live Butterflies” allows you to go outside and see virtual butterflies around you. Now we can go on and push the real ones to extinction.
Ever played Duplo (the big blocks version of Lego) as a toddler? Worried that your kids will only want to play with things that have touch screens on them? Worry not, legoplatformer.com will turn your old bricks into a mobile augmented reality platform capable of running computer games. On a serious note, that’s one example of the power of Qualcomm’s AR SDK:
If you thought that augmented reality can only place virtual object in real environments, think again. AR can also be used to ‘delete’ real object, making them transparent.
Case in point, Francesco I. Cosco’s work presented at ISMAR09 (which reminds me that ISMAR 2010 is less than two weeks away!). In this work, Cosco and other researchers from the University of Calabria, Italy and the Rey Juan Carlos university in Spain, tried to add haptic interaction to an augmented environment. Problem is, haptic devices are visually not attractive, and aren’t really a part of the scene. The solution they came up with was quite ‘magical’:
Cosco F. I., Garre C., Bruno F., Muzzupappa M., Otaduy M. A. “Augmented Touch without Visual Obtrusion”. Proceedings of the IEEE International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality 2009.
Got a little bit addicted to Google AI Challenge, so I haven’t updated as I should have during the last week. Luckily, still have time for a quick linkfest:
New Scientist has an interesting piece on indoors navigation systems and the battle of methods in this world.
ISMAR is coming soon and the organizing committee has launched two interesting contests – Marker Design & Demo Video.
‘Guerilla’ augmented reality art invasion/exhibition in the MoMA New York. You don’t really need the curator’s approval to get your art into the museum.
And if you are already at the museum, you may want to use OmniAR to gain insight on the art pieces.
Last week I had a video in Dutch, this week we have a video from Lithuania. It seems that in Lithuania the national sport is augmented basketball (or am I making this thing up?). More details, in Lithuanian, here.
Mobile, image recognition based, augmented reality is very cool, as evident from the Popcode’s demos we posted yesterday. However, creation of a model used by the mobile phone to recognize a new image still requires a desktop, hindering realtime creation and sharing of AR content.
Thanks to the work of researchers from the Korean Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology and the Swiss EPFL, this needn’t be the case anymore. In a paper titled “Point-and-Shoot for Ubiquitous Tagging on Mobile Phones” accepted to ISMAR 2010, they present a method to scan surfaces and create “recognition-models” by using your phone (no data is sent to a remote server).
You don’t even need to take the perfect straight-on picture. As the video below shows, this means you can augment hard to reach surfaces. Best of all, you can share those models with your friends.
Back from my short hiatus. As I wasn’t able to attend ISMAR, I had to follow the conference via the impressions of others:
If you hadn’t read it yet, you sould – Ori’s ISMAR summary: “Top 10 tidbits reshaping the augmented reality industry“. I’ve found his sixth bullet point, the shortest of them all, the most interesting. Microsoft is pursuing augmented reality, and they have a plan. Also check out Ori’s impressions from the Mobile Magic Wand seminar.
By far the most numerous reports come from Gail Carmichael who covered rather extensively the “Falling in Love with Learning” workshop (part two and three). She also had a post on the Handheld AR Games workshop, and a post covering a bunch of ISMAR papers that revolve around human factors and user interfaces (which is my favorite, touching on some surprising results). Gail also made a video summary of some of the demos presented.
Thomas Carpenter had an excellent review of the head mounted displays presented at the conference. Above all, it’s Tom’s enthusiasm that makes me feel depressed that I missed ISMAR.
And of course, Robert Rice shares his impressions from ISMAR. His post made me wonder whether there’s a place for another AR conference, dedicated to the industry (while ISMAR will mainly be for the academy). If augmented reality really takes off, I bet O’Reilly will set such a conference.
I’m pretty sure more posts will come later this week (I’m looking at you Tish), and I’ve probably missed a few that were already published, so feel free to add links in the comments. In the meanwhile, today we have not one, but three weekly videos, all coming from ISMAR.
First, here’s conference attendees playing with Sony’s EyePet, the mini-games look like a lot of fun:
Last is a demo for Carnegie Mellon’s “Dynamic Seethroughs: Synthesizing Hidden Views of Moving Objects” paper, presented at ISMAR, courtesy of New Scientist, showing a neat transparent wall trick that could one day be incorporated into cars. I cannot embed the video over here, but do check it out at the link above.
The guys at Hit Lab New Zealand and the Visual Media Lab at the Ben Gurion University, Israel, have uploaded a new video presenting the results of their ISMAR09 paper “In-Place 3D Sketching for Authoring and Augmenting Mechanical Systems”. Since the paper is not online yet, I can’t really tell how much of it is really automatic, and how robust is it, but the video is nothing less than magical:
I really envy those future physics high-school students…
As usual, here’s a bunch of links to augmented reality related news bits that have accumulated in my inbox during the week:
There’s no end to the augmented reality browsers phenomenon. Cyclopedia is yet another browser that is based on Wikipedia, Bradesco is helping you find your way around Brazil, and AugmentThis! lets you upload kml files and share them with others.
Peak.ar on the other hand is a specialized browser from Salzburg Research that only lets you see the names of mountain tops around the world.
While Wikitude is finally available for the iPhone (but you wouldn’t know that if you had visited www.wikitude.org as to the writing of this post).
So, with so many AR browser available, how are they all doing, buisness wise? Gene Becker collected some appstore statistics, that shows that AcrossAir’s applications are leading in terms of downloads among the non-free applications available on the American appstore.
What’s that augmented reality that I mention so much? I guess most of this blog’s patrons already know, but here’s Scientific American explantion, though I think YDreams’ post is far better.
This week’s video is a lovely tour de force from Oxford’s Active Vision Labratory’s Robert Castle. Although Ori posted a sneak peak to ISMAR 09, he somehow missed this video. It shows an extension to the PTAMM system that allows “multiple objects to be recognized and localized within multiple maps.”
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:
Games Alfresco 