How to Produce Augmented Reality Applications: Share Your Experience and Help Nurture a Healthy Industry

Posted on January 25, 2010 by Ori Inbar
Marshal Kirkpatrick, the lead blogger for Read Write Web – one of the first tech blogs to dive into the fascinating field of augmented reality  – is working on a research report about the use of AR for marketing.
In order to generate data for the report  that best reflects the market reality – he has put together a survey.
In fact, he prepared two surveys: one for webcam-based AR applications, and a second for mobile AR applications.
Here’s Marshal’s message:
We hope that people in the industry will be
interested in anonymously contributing their knowledge so we can all benefit from the aggregate results.   The intended respondents for these surveys are people who have built or have hired other people to build AR apps.  The intended readership of the results are people who are interested in hiring AR developers.  We hope this information will help more people feel comfortable hiring AR developers, that more information will be good for the AR economy and the people who want to be a part of it.   We’ll be sending the results out to everyone who participates, along with a discount code if you’d like to purchase the larger research report this will be a part of.   If you’ve got any questions you can email me at marshall@readwriteweb.com  Thanks for you time taking these surveys.
This is a most welcome collaboration between ReadWriteWeb and Gamesalfresco, and we intend to share the highlights of this initiative on this blog.
***
Expect a talk by Marshall about this initiative at this year’s most anticipated AR commercial Event – coincidentally titled the Augmented Reality Event, scheduled for Jun 2-3, 2010 in Santa Clara, California.

To access the surveys go to:

Webcam AR

Mobile AR

Filed under: AR Business, AR Events | Tagged: , , , , | 6 Comments »

Mobile Augmented Reality Goes Way Beyond Markers

Posted on January 12, 2009 by Ori Inbar

The dust from CES 2009 has barely settled over many shiny new devices, and new advancements in Handheld Augmented Reality software are already emerging from Vienna.

Daniel Wagner and his team at Graz University have come up with new and improved capabilities.

High Speed Natural Feature Tracking on a mobile phone

We saw an early implementation of Studierstube ES at ISMAR 08, so I asked Daniel what’s new about this capability, besides being faster and more robust.

Daniel: We can now track multiple images and switch arbitrarily. I believe it is now at a level that it can really be used in practice.

Games alfresco: Looks great. Based on the video it seems that it runs on Windows Mobile 6 (ASUS p552w, iPAQ 614c). What about other platforms?

Daniel: Not bad! It is written in C/C++, [but] since this is pure math code, it could be ported easily to any platform. Our AR framework is still Windows Mobile only, although we now also have Linux support (desktop only since we lack a Linux phone). MacOS and Symbian are in the making and should be available in a month or so.

Tracking of Business Cards on a mobile phone

Daniel: On January 20th we have the official opening of our “Christian Doppler Lab” (founded by the Christian Doppler agency). For that purpose I created a small demo for tracking business cards. In the future we’ll replace the 3D content with something more useful…

I can’t talk about Daniel without mentioning WARM ’09; He is the main organizer of this Winter Augmented Reality Event on 12th-13th February 2009 at Graz University, Austria. Registration is over, but if you really want to go and have something cool to present – you may be able to convince Daniel to let you in.

Should you get your hands on this powerful technology (assuming Imagination makes it available for licensing soon) what would YOU do with it?

Filed under: AR Tracking | Tagged: , , , , , | 3 Comments »

A Formidable Mobile Augmented Reality Device? Meet the HTC Touch HD

Posted on November 29, 2008 by Ori Inbar

The new contender to become the mobile augmented reality device of choice is here: meet the HTC Touch HD.

htc-touch-hd-combo

PC World (Taiwan) hands on experience is pretty favorable.

With a far better screen (800×480 compared with iPhone’s 480×320) and a higher rez camera (5MP compared with iPhones 2MP) and its ability to record video (unlike the iPhone’s), it looks very promising.

The only big caveat is the high price tag ($776). It’s now available in Taiwan but poised to hit the EU and US by year end.

It will not have the screen size and the power of a MID – but it fits in a pocket, which is a plus for most of us.

As a result, the HTC Touch HD takes the place of the elusive Meizu M8 (still not out) on my top 5 mobile Devices for high-end AR.

Here is the updated round up.

ar-device-comparison3

Which one do you like best?

Filed under: AR Devices | Tagged: , | 3 Comments »