Here are some more augmented reality news stories that happened this week:
MIT’s Sixth Sense to be open-sourced. Well, I know most don’t see any future in projector enabled augmented reality, yet there’s more to Sixth Sense than a projector (gesture recognition, image recognition), and it’s a lot more feasible than see-through HMD AR at this stage, so quite exciting news.
Augmented Planet has started doing a head to head comparison of the different AR browsers out there. Rumor has it that round two features very surprising results.
A demo of Esquire’s augmented reality issue. The comments are even more interesting than the video itself – “Holy balls you guys are innovative! Props!”.
We are signing off this week with a new video out of TU Graz, showing adding annotations online to panoramas. I’ve written about it in more detail before, here, so we can just relax and enjoy the video this time:
The industry could battle the hype and mislabeling by establishing standards the rest of us can understand. Otherwise, augmented reality will quickly meet the same fate as “green” products: Marketers will advertise even the slightest of augments as “augmented reality,” leaving consumers confused and bewildered.
On the other hand there’s Robert Rice’s reply to that Fast Company article.
Well, I don’t think that anyone will deny there’s a lot of of hype around augmented reality at the moment, and I’m sure most believe that augmented reality has a great potential. It is my humble opinion that really exciting AR is still a few years away and in order to get there, we need to keep the hype at bay. As Rice writes, there’s a fine line between evangelizing and hyping, and we should be careful not to cross it. Not that it’s going to help, as many startups are pumping air into the bubble, hoping for an exit before it bursts.
Mobile application (videos for your pleasure): Browser for parks, finding your car with Car Finder, inserting UFOs and witches to photograph with MagiCam, and LocFinder a well designed “AR” version of a compass.
This week’s video is of an art performance named .txt , that features a tag cloud haunting a dancer. I’m not an art critique, so I can say anything about the performance itself, but technology wise, it’s using YDreams’ YVision for real time interaction between the dancer and words (via @YDreams):
While reading this week’s linkfest you may find some links are missing – don’t worry, many ISMAR related links and videos will be posted later this week.
“There will be at least one terrorist attack that has used mobile augmented reality for planning, practice, and execution.”, this is just one of many predicitons by Robert Rice for the augmented world of 2012.
Read Write Web theorize on why VCs aren’t backing AR startups, and Robert Rice shares his experience. Well, according to ABI Research augmented reality will be a 350$ million market in 2014. That’s actually a pretty small figure (especially for a technology that aims to change the world), so maybe VCs just don’t see the next Youtube in it.
Of course, this coming week will see the appearance of the highly anticipated Junaio from Metaio. Metaio has realeased a new video for the occasion and we get to read Gene Becker’s impressions.
It always looks like the guys at YDreams are having lots of fun. This time they are playing soccer. Without a real ball.
Campaigns: Esquire made Robert Downey Junior sit on a very big marker, SAP shows its line of products with an augmented rubik cube (warning! a very annoying narrator), there’s a street fighter like augmented reality game to promote the G.I.Joe DVD (what’s a summer blockbuster without some augmented love) and you can become an elephant in this British campaign to ban the use of wild animals from circuses.
Although Halloween was yesterday, and I’ve dedicated a whole post to Halloween related AR, here’s another cute scarry example found by Bruce Sterling. Actually is part of a campaign to promote eco-friendly chargers and power managemant systems, and you can try it yourself here.
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.
Not going to ISMAR :\. Since going to Florida is not an easy trip for me, I would have like to stay there for more than a couple of days. However, my current workload maje such a vacation impossible. I’m sure Ori and Thomas will do a great work covering it. In the meantime, I’ll take the next few days off from blogging, and will be back with my 200th post (woot!). Hope to see you all at ISMAR Korea!
Now, having done with the excuses, here’s the weekly linkfest:
Lodestone AR Compass is a browser for the great outdoors. Two bucks and it’s on your iPhone.
CiviCast (from CiviGuard) is an augmented reality browser for civil services with a lofty goal – “To guide & protect global civilian populations in the event of a crisis through authoritative & reliable information delivery over mobile communications networks.”
Can’t even call it a browser, 3d Compass is just a floating compass for Android.
A more detailed video of what the augmented reality experience to promote the Transformers DVD would look like (hope it’s better than the movie :).
The weekly video is from the Australian band Lost Valentinos. In order to promote their latest single (Nightmoves) they chose (what a surprise) to use augmented reality. We have seen AR clips before and AR used to promote singles as well (see for example this application for Eminem). However, Lost Valentinos found a simple yet ingenious way to use augmented reality – they shot each band member perform the song on its own, match each one with a marker, and let their fans to compose their own videoclip via AR. As the press release says – “From lead singer Nik performing the song atop a user’s shoulders, to the whole band playing the song at the base of the Eiffel Tower”. Try it yourself over here (and btw, don’t search for nightmoves on Youtube from work).
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.”
This week’s quote comes from Blair’s post I’ve mentioned above (and yes, I took it out of context, because I’m a blogger!):
Now that the time is here, now that the promised AR apps can be published in the iTunes store, will they be able to live up to their claims, or will they (and their claims) fade away? I suspect things will die down for a little while. At least, I hope things die down for a while
And this week’s video comes from YDreams, and you have probably seen it before. It’s called Flyar, and it’s an interactive screen saver that shows you Twitter updates with birds that respond to your hand-gestures, a la EyeToy. Yeah, the video makes it clearer:
Metaio announces the coming release of Junaio, but doesn’t give much information about what Junaio really is.
And in other news:
Total Immersion now enters the world of soccer trading cards, at least in Italy.
You can get pregnant without the morning sickness via the wonders of Flash based AR.
The Virtec project is a thesis project using AR to teach about Aztec culture by means of a book and a head mounted display.
This week’s video revisits one of this blog’s reoccurring themes, the Transformers (previously here and here). This application comes with the Transformers coming DVD, or as this trailer puts it “Prepare for Augmented Reality! An exclusive 3D Holographic Experience!”:
Actually, it was a relatively quiet week in the ARSphere. Here are some links to news bits that I haven’t had the time to cover over here:
In the mobile AR front:
Kooaba is an iPhone application that much like Snaptell (or Nokia’s “Point and Find”) lets you take a picture of a product and get information about it. Now they venture into the realm of AR browsers, but since they fail to show their image-based browser working on a real iPhone, I’ll remain skeptic for now.
Cyborg is an AR application that helps you find the cheapest gas station around. Yes, they could do that with a simple map, but that’s like having a web 2.0 site without rounded corners.
And if you live in Hong Kong, forget about gas prices, just use this application to find the nearest train.
Augmented reality wiki – what a fab idea! (especially considering the dire state of the “augmented reality” article at Wikipedia).
AdoptMe.com offers you to adopt augmented pets. Haven’t tested it, but seems quite shabby (it’s like the site’s design was taken from 1996).
This week video comes from Techcrunch’s favorite Tonchidot, makers of the Sekai Camera. Apparently their application was finally submitted to the iPhone’s appstore, and we may soon compare it to other AR browsers. The next video is indeed in Japanese, but starting from 0:45 you can easily understand what’s going on, even if you are not a native Japanese speaker. It certainly has some Japanese flair to it:
Oh, there’s just too much to write about this week.
In the mobile AR front:
Nokia’s researcher Kari Pulli gave a talk last week at the SDForum about Nokia’s take on mobile augmented reality (slides). In a nutshell, it should be based on image recognition and accessed using HMD. And here are some more details from the Nokia World event that took part this week.
buUuk is an AR browser-like application for Asia, Australia and the middle east. [via DMFO]
While Presselite which brought us Metro Paris has an application for Tokyo that looks much the same.
And GeoVector, one of the veteran players in the AR industry is going to release an application for Android named WorldSurfer. They accidently published a post about it in their corporate blog (dated for next week) and then deleted it. Luckily, there’s Google Cache.
In the world of novelty AR advertisement:
You can check whether the new Samsung LED television fits your living room (which is actually a bit handy).
Here’s a silly video of augmented reality game of hangman from a company named HD interactive. It seems they want to sell it to the public. Tom Carpenter shares his opinion about this topic.
This week’s video comes from Vodafone, which had a lightly augmented version of the game of tag in the Netherlands for the launch of the HTC magic. More details can be found here.
Games Alfresco 