Weekly Linkfest

Posted on September 6, 2009 by rouli

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]
  • Discover Anywhere Mobile is a Canadian company set to provide AR application to help you ride North American public transit.
  • 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).
  • ABC promotes their new thriller FlashForward.
  • I’m not into baseball, so there’s something about a Rawlings golden glove over here.
  • You can’t escape augmented reality even if you live in Vietnam, thanks to Coca Cola.

In other news:

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.

Have a nice week!

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Yelp introduces Augmented Reality to the iPhone via Easter Egg

Posted on August 27, 2009 by rouli

While I’m quite a skeptic whether Presslite’s Metro Paris application for the iPhone has “AR capabilities” in the version available on the appstore, there’s no denying Yelp’s application does.
Found by Robert Scoble (I’m pretty sure it was leaked to Scoble), and brought to my awareness my ReadWriteWeb, shaking your iPhone while on Yelp’s main menu three times, will open up an hidden feature named monocle. Monocle is nothing but an augmented reality view of Yelp’s listing, as shown in the next video (many thanks to Tom Carpenter for finding this one):

It only works on the iPhone 3gs, but unlike Metro Paris, it’s free, so don’t hesitate to tr y it out. Now, I don’t think that in the long run it matters whether Apple knew or not about this feature. Obviously, mobile augmented reality is here, and we are only about see more of it in the coming months. What should matter is what’s next? Where will innovation come from, if everyone is using the same compass and GPS combo?
I for one think that we are in the middle of the “AR browsers” season, but the next big thing, which better suits the technology at hand (imprecise compasses), is mobile AR games. What are your thoughts?

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