Back. It seems that I escaped London on the very last minute before the airports closed down. Here’s a rundown of augmented reality links for the last couple of weeks:
PrimeSense, Willow Garage, and Side-Kick Games join hands to create to OpenNI an organization whose goal is to promote natural interaction. First step was releasing ‘official’ drivers for Kinect.
Follow this link to see a video of bad acting and terrible music. Oh, and some clever eye tracking based augmented reality UI from Helsinki university of technology.
A nice piece on Neatorama, which went QR crazy lately, on surprising mediums for QR codes, including a sand castle and a M&Ms.
The biggest news these days is Word Lens. I’m sure you have all seen it already, and I plan to write full post on it next week, but for the oft chance you haven’t yet encountered it – it’s augmented reality based translation app for the iPhone. Or in other words, magic:
Have a great week, winter/summer solstice and merry Christmas!
I’m going to London next week (where I’ll might be tempted to get a Kinect), so this is probably the last linkfest till mid-December. I’ll try to keep my twitter account updated with interesting links while I’m away. Anyway, here’s this week’s linkfest:
I never met the guys from Layar in person, but I think I would really enjoy a conversation with any one of the founders. I think the secret of their success is not luck or being first to market (which they weren’t), but being both highly intelligent, yet very nice folks. Here’s a short interview with Claire Boonstra on Layar’s past and future. Winning quote – Augmented reality is the next mass medium, the first unboxed medium:
No doubt about it, this week was under the sign of Kinect. Dozens of amateur programers used the OpenKinect drivers to create wonderful, many times AR related, demos. These and more in this week’s linkfest:
Kinect hacking is nice, but the biggest news of the week is coming from Layar which raised another $14M. Follow the link to read a letter from Layar’s CEO Raimo van der Klein, on what it means and what’s next for Layar.
And here’s yet another video showing the power of Kinect. Created by Theo Watson in a single day, this is a very impressive skeleton tracker. How long will we have to wait till someone finds a way to combile AR glasses with Kinect?
Here are some of the stories you might have missed this passing week from around the AR-sphere:
Total Immersion uploaded videos of the two keynotes given in their AR Immersion conference. I find the Adobe one is quite boring, but TI’s CEO, Bruno Uzzan gives a very good talk on the past, present and future of AR.
This week’s video is short and sweet, showing how a guitar lesson can be augmented. We have seen implementations of similar ideas before, but as far as I recall, it’s the first with marker-less tracking of the guitar itself. Of course, it’s nothing but a demo, and I’ll be surprised if it tracks any guitar but the one in the video. It’s cool, nonetheless:
Time again for another bout of augmented reality links:
Keep calm and carry on: the United Kingdom is looking to use augmented reality in the fight against terrorism. Have an idea on how to make this happen? help them out.
Apple patents augmented reality first-person shooting games. Not that they are the first ones who thought about it.
Augmented Planet holding their second annual Readers Choice Award. There’s a Samsung phone to be won.
This week’s video shows the creative things you can do using computer vision, projector and balls. It’s called Bounce, and apparently was made by Eberhard Gräther as a student project. If you like it, I suggest checking Gräther’s site for other interesting (non AR related) projects:
After a short break, here’s another weekly linkfest:
“AR is not going to work well for most things but it’s going to be very good for certain uses. Right now I’m very keen at trying to understand what those things might be”. Tish Shute interviews Chris Arkenberg.
Just in time for Halloween, the French game company Momorprods released a new iPhone game called “Ghost Blasters”, which puts you in the role of a ghost buster blaster. Writes Jerome Moreau:
I realize we’ve done nothing truly original so far. We have plenty of ideas for updates tough, but we tried to get a basic version out of the door in time for Halloween. This was really our first try at making an iPhone game and as you’ll see in the credits there’s definitely not too many of us on the team :p
In future updates, we plan to improve the monsters and weapons, etc., but more importantly add geolocation and social network-oriented multiplayer.
The game is free and available here, so why won’t you give it a chance?
First, and foremost, I owe an apology to Total Immersion which I criticized for having an invitation only event (AR-Immersion). They have kindly reminded me that their event is free of charge, unlike other similar events. Anyway, you can ask for an invitation here.
Now that this is behind us, here are other things that happened in the AR-sphere:
This week’s video proves that augmented reality can be annoying at times, like a virtual fly you can shake off. Created by Michele Cirulli, this was apparently a video installation at the Live Performers Meeting this year.
LightSpace from Microsoft Research – augmenting a room with projectors and 3d cameras. As I’ve said earlier, it’s amazing how a technology that would have looked like magic just four years ago, is quite banal these days.
Now Total Immersion are having a one day AR event. It’s November the 9th in LA. Sadly, it’s an invitations only event. They should learn something from their beer loving competitors from Germany.
Today’s video is coming to us straight from ISMAR 2010. It’s a presentation of the results achieved in the paper “Build Your World and Play In It: Interacting with Surface Particles on Complex Objects” by Brett Jones and other researchers from the University of Illinois. The paper presents a way to map virtual content on 3d physical constructions and “play” with them. For more details check out Jones’ website. I think that Angry Birds would be prefect on such a platform:
Have a great week, and the lucky of you who get to be in ISMAR, take some videos, please!
This past week, Metaio held their first insideAR conference and thankfully have uploaded all the videos from the event within a few days. Some interesting stuff there, which I’ll cover tomorrow.
Speaking of Metaio, Tish Shute held another of her in depth interviews, this time with Metaio’s CEO, Thomas Alt
As for this week’s video, we have Sky Canvas, an iPhone application with a brilliant concept behind it, from Shiodome Innovation Studio, Japan. A part of their PaPaCo Design Project, Shiodome tried to create an application that can be played together by a father and his son. With Sky Canvas, the two can form clouds in the shape of animals by tapping and blowing air to the microphone. Unfortunately, the app is not available outside of Japan, so I can’t really test it, but as you surely have understood by now, I dig the concept:
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.
Games Alfresco 