To my many readers coming from Japan – my heart goes to you, and I hope your families are safe. It’s difficult to discuss “augmented reality” in the face of “tragic reality”, but I’ll do my best with this week’s linkfest.
This week’s video is a call for help to create the first crowed sourced AR music video. Led by students of Tokyo’s Temple University, fans of the British band Songdog are invited to contribute their own clips featuring an AR marker. According to their site (where you can find more details) “Augmented Reality is used to symbolize all that one can remember, but that is lost forever – you can see it, but you can’t touch it”. A beautiful idea that I hope will come true in spite of the unexpected challenges facing it.
This tradition cannot be stopped, here’s another weekly linkfest:
Pocket Lint posted many articles about AR celebrating “AR Week“, and I must admit that I haven’t read any one of those yet for a lack of time. But they do seem interesting though!
Sony follows Nintendo’s lead, and demos augmented reality on the next gen PSP. Is this evidence of AR becoming a must have feature for mobile games platforms?
Stealth AR startup Bubbli to make “the virtual and the real become indistinguishable”, and they are looking for workers. If only I was living in California …
This week’s video comes from Robert Scoble’s tour in SRI International, showing a handbag buying application, using Kinect to make it seem like a real handbag is actually dangling from the lady’s arm. See more videos, including one aboud head mounted display based AR gaming, in this post, titled “A Look At How SRI Is Augmenting The Human Condition“:
Only a few weeks ago, we reported on Virtual Master Reel, an augmented reality game whose aim was catching virtual fish with an augmented fishing reel. Seems that augmented reality fishing games are trending right now, because Nintendo got one for its Nintendo 3ds platform. Video doesn’t do it justice, because the whole 3d display thingy is lost, but it still looks good. You can read more about the planned AR games for 3ds on Wired.
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”:
This week’s video is a must see. Being in German, I can’t tell you much about it, but it seems to be a concept design for in car head up display done as a university assignment. It looks very realistic and compelling – I can’t wait to have such a display in my car:
I found this week’s video on Toby’s weekend “linkfest”. It’s one more example how augmented reality can upgrade almost any old board game, this time making “battleships” more interactive. As Toby rightfully states, there’s no need for two boards when AR is deployed, as the two players can be shown different views of the same board. Still, it’s a cool demo:
A bit of a busy week, here are just some of the augmented reality stories that happened in the past seven days:
Where can you find Metaio’s Peter Meier and Layar’s Maarten Lens-FitzGerald on the same panel? At the DLD conference. Video well worth worth watching if only for seeing Lens-FitzGerald’s face when Meier declares Junaio as the most advanced AR mobile application.
Pantomation is the late 70’s edition of Kinect and augmented reality. Makes me wonder what the people of 2040 will think about our current technology (via @String)
Sometimes, you don’t need enticing narrative to create a touching AR application. “Jack in the box” by the Spanish company Sensaa is an evidence to that. Just open a box, and an augmented surprise will pop out of it. Simple, but wonderful:
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:
As you may have guessed this passing week was very slow in augmented reality news (or any news for that matter). Nevertheless, I scoured the web and bring you this weekly linkfest.
Last week I reported on the winter crop of augmented reality games coming from Qualcomm AR Game Studio. The videos of three more games were recently uploaded, so be sure to check them up.
DOMO, Tonchidot’s newest project, aspires to enable transparent society, where you could see everyone’s thoughts and interests.
Open question on Quora – What will be the most important developments in augmented reality in 2011? I tried giving my best answer, though you may disagree with me. (via @TishShute)
What a better way to start the new year than playing a round of augmented golf? That’s exactly what the students at Rochester Institute of Technology thought when they came up with this game that doesn’t require an entire fairway.
I have frequently lashed out at gimmicky usage of augmented reality in ad campaigns. However, the next campaign by German agency brand.david powered by Junaio gets only praises from me. First, it’s for a good cause – bringing the subject of domestic violence to light. It also seems to use AR very effectively:
Games Alfresco 