Before we begin with our weekly pile of links, here’s a message from Christine Perey on behalf of “the program committee of the Third International AR Standards meeting”:
But lest us forget about the European counterparts: Augmented Planet 2011 and the AR Summit (which ironically falls for me on a trip to the United States)
This week’s video goes to you Dr. Who fans – I’ll never understand your ways. Sean McCracken apparently does, and thus created this Android app, available on the Android market to display an augmented version of the TARDIS. Everlasting glory to the first fan who will create a video of Daleks shouting “augment! augment!”
Many of the AR community went to the second annual Augmented Reality Event. Sadly, I wasn’t able to be there, but luckily, Augmented Citizen share some thoughts and presentations from the event, Locative Media have some “pirated videos” of the keynotes and Layar uploaded videos of a couple of their presentations to Youtube. If you have a video or a blog post about the event – send me an email or give me a tweet.
Sander Veenhof is a genius (there, I said it!) and Layar should be paying him money for choosing their platform if they don’t already do so. This time he came up with a way to use augmented reality to create a world wide synchronized dancing routine. It’s an augmented macarena!
This week’s video is of a simple augmented reality game, called Tapcloud with an interesting premise. By chasing virtual cloud (and looking a little bit foolish), the game forces you to get some exercise, and even counts the number of calories you burned once it’s game over. The game is available for free on the app store, so you have nothing to lose (except, again, calories).
ARE2011 is only two days away, and I’m going to miss it (this time its my fault, and I can’t blame Delta Airways). I’m a lame excuse for an AR blogger, I know. If you go there, please shoot some videos and share!
Tish Shute interviews Vernor Vinge on the promise, progress and threats of AR. “I see four or five concurrently active paths to the Singularity … If we humans want to keep our hand in the game, AR is an important thing to pursue.”
Our weekly video comes today from the Future Lions 2011 contest, where young advertising professionals are called to “Advertise a product from a global brand in a way that couldn’t have been done five years ago, to an audience of your choosing”. Tom Houser and Victoria Trow came up a way to use augmented reality as an alternative source of income for record companies. I am a bit of a skeptic, but it’s an interesting idea nonetheless:
Took a break last week (missed me? you should follow me on Twitter), back today with many AR links:
Happy Mother’s Day! It can be even happier if you get your Mom an AR cake (via DMFO)
Tish Shute and Ori Inbar hold an interview with Bruce Sterling – it doesn’t make sense to write fiction about augmented reality nowadays as AR is not fictional topic anymore.
As part of the ARE2011 media blitz, Sterling was also interviewed, together with Vernor Vinge on ReadWriteWeb about augmented reality in the workplace.
Plush toys on sale at a virtual store, existing only in the augmented world of Layar.
This week in the linkfest – computer vision, Easter bunnies and furniture:
“Augmented Reality for Smartphones” is a 50 pages-long report that analyzes many popular AR platforms in order to give developers better perspective on what’s available in the market today.
Computer vision (2): Raimo van der Klein gives an excellent talk on why computer vision, like biological vision at the time, will start an evolutionary arms race – Birth of the Digital Eye.
Computer vision (3): IQ Engines is a cool startup, offering “vision as a service”. I’ve tried their mobile application, and it is amazing at recognizing objects – but also usually slow, because it is still partially based on humans behind the scenes.
Fraunhofer presents an eye-tracking microdisplay that delivers Terminator vision (via @Ben_Thomas_Ech).
Oh noes! Giant Easter bunnies invade the Earth!
Finally, if you ever find yourself confused by IKEA’s instructions, there will be an app for that (maybe).
This week’s video was featured on Bruce Sterling’s Beyond the Beyond, but if you missed it, here’s your opportunity. It’s in French, and depicts a modern fairy tale, made possible by augmented reality. Luckily you don’t need to know French to follow the story, and I find it only adding to the video’s allure. (However, I’ll be thankful if you can translate the old guy at the end of the video in the comments).
It’s time again for the weekly linkfest, a collection of augmented reality news stories that I didn’t find the time to blog about during the past week:
If you are still debating whether to go to Augmented Reality Event 2011, Tish Shute has a good writeup on what you can expect to see there (and a $100 coupon).
Augmented reality sketch-a-race demo for iPad2 by Ogmento
Brazilian police to use “Robocop” glasses to recognize criminals and terrorists in crowds? Sounds like a hoax, but this article, and the one on which it is based, were written after April fools.
This week’s video comes to us from Nokia Research, showing their indoor navigation solution. Coming from Nokia Research, one of the first bodies to look into mobile AR, this should be considered as no more than a teaser. It’s very cool and alluring with its 30cm accuracy, and its “where I put my keys” functionality, but not likely to be adopted anytime soon. Five years from now, Apple/Google will probably come with inferior solution which will be hugely successful. You can read more about the technology on GSM Arena.
Wow, what a busy week. I’ve listed below only a few of this week’s AR related news stories, just to protect you from an information overload. I hope to blog about the other stories in the coming days.
This computer vision and augmented reality mind map found by Etsuji, is a bit lacking on the commercial side (for example, Metaio is not listed under companies), but seems ok on the research side of things.
Pipe dream or a dream just waiting to come true? Gotham Eyewear: “What are we building? We are building augmented reality glasses for the masses.
This week’s video is magnificent in its simplicity. Nothing more than a demo of Qualcomm’s AR platform, featuring virtual domino bricks, it made me think what would happen if they’ll scale this game. Anyone in the world could place bricks, and anyone could push a brick and start a world-wide chain reaction, but of the playful kind. A simple game that will cross borders and cultures, or maybe I’m a walking cliche?
Sander Veenhof created the first one-dimensional art piece using Layar, aptly named 1px (math geeks, calm down! a pixel is indeed not 1 dimensional, but as close as one can get). You can also see an interview with Veenhof about art in AR.
If you have any programming in the last year, you surely know of StackOverflow.com. Now there’s an attempt to create a similar Q&A site for augmented reality. If you think this idea has any merit then show your support.
April fools: AdBlock Freedom – augmented reality eyewear that detects and removes ads from the world in realtime. Probably the guys at AdBlock never heard of Artvertiser.
I love videos done by students to show off their work. This week we are lucky to have Predator, a very impressive video (though I haven’t tried it myself) tracking algorithm resulting from Zdenek Kalal’s phd thesis at the University of Surrey, UK. You can try it yourself by downloading a compiled application to your pc, and read more about it here. Though desktop bound right now, Kalal claims that “implementation for mobile devices is feasible”.
The spring is here (unless you live below the equator, and somehow don’t fall off the face of the earth), and it brings some great links (and allergens) :
Librarian’s dream app – researchers from Miami University created an augmented reality meets mobile application to help keep books ordered on libraries’ shelves.
Beats me why the need the money, I always assumed they make millions, but Total Immersion gets USD $5,5M in funding led by Intel Capital (which, interestingly, also funded Layar).
Quimo from the University of South Australia, is like play-doh for augmented reality. This “deformable material” supports “freeform modeling in spatial AR environments” by embedding almost invisible AR markers.
“The Witness” is a German half-movie-half alternative reality game that uses AR (or pseudo-AR) to move the plot forward (via @GaryPHayes).
This week’s featured video is coming to us from Microsoft, a company that develops stunning technologies just to see them later made into products and sold by the likes of Apple. Here they develop a “Photosynth Lite”, enabling users to create 3d models by taking a few pictures with their cellphones. I wonder where this technology can be applied:
This week’s video is a fantastic demo of Seac02’s Eligo SDK power to track 3d objects and overlay virtual layers on them. This gives the programmer the ability to “X-Ray” a model car:
Games Alfresco 