Games Alfresco

That was quite a week for augmented reality.
The top article at Games Alfresco was “Augmented Fear of Heights” (with about 1000 views!), and on Augmented Times the top post was about Marco Tempest’s magic Trick.

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 1: Augmented Reality Will Blur the Line Between Online and Offline.
• 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 York Times had a piece about electronic eyeglasses and contact lenses.
• O’Reilly has another very thorough tutorial on FLARToolKit.
• Record scratching using ARToolKit (thanks Anatoly!).
• ISMAR 2009 now has a Youtube channel.
• 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:

Have a nice week!

Filed under: Uncategorized | Tagged: artoolkit, flartoolkit, ISMAR, ISMAR 2009, linkfest, SPRXMobile | 5 Comments »