Had a very good trip to the US (apart from the trans-atlantic flights) and now I’m back! Let’s see what I have been missing –
Modojo laments the sad state of augmented reality video games: “Thus far, no company has been willing to create an augmented reality video game based on a million selling series. Everything’s a new intellectual property, which is usually a hard sell, even without AR”.
The above article mentions Reality Fighters, published by Sony, which actually looks pretty cool.
Design concept: Papyrus – communication with time, augmented reality display of buildings’ past glory. This concept is not that far-fetched, seeing that Layar has “historic layers”.
It’s been a while since we have featured a kinect hack in the weekly video spot, so I’m happy to present, Saint Kinect, created by Youtube user koshiik with “100 lines of code and 2 beers”. Fight the devil wearing a halo on your head –
Many of the AR community went to the second annual Augmented Reality Event. Sadly, I wasn’t able to be there, but luckily, Augmented Citizen share some thoughts and presentations from the event, Locative Media have some “pirated videos” of the keynotes and Layar uploaded videos of a couple of their presentations to Youtube. If you have a video or a blog post about the event – send me an email or give me a tweet.
Sander Veenhof is a genius (there, I said it!) and Layar should be paying him money for choosing their platform if they don’t already do so. This time he came up with a way to use augmented reality to create a world wide synchronized dancing routine. It’s an augmented macarena!
This week’s video is of a simple augmented reality game, called Tapcloud with an interesting premise. By chasing virtual cloud (and looking a little bit foolish), the game forces you to get some exercise, and even counts the number of calories you burned once it’s game over. The game is available for free on the app store, so you have nothing to lose (except, again, calories).
Wow, what a busy week. I’ve listed below only a few of this week’s AR related news stories, just to protect you from an information overload. I hope to blog about the other stories in the coming days.
This computer vision and augmented reality mind map found by Etsuji, is a bit lacking on the commercial side (for example, Metaio is not listed under companies), but seems ok on the research side of things.
Pipe dream or a dream just waiting to come true? Gotham Eyewear: “What are we building? We are building augmented reality glasses for the masses.
This week’s video is magnificent in its simplicity. Nothing more than a demo of Qualcomm’s AR platform, featuring virtual domino bricks, it made me think what would happen if they’ll scale this game. Anyone in the world could place bricks, and anyone could push a brick and start a world-wide chain reaction, but of the playful kind. A simple game that will cross borders and cultures, or maybe I’m a walking cliche?
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“:
Looking for a way to send Christmas greeting cards to your friends with an augmented reality twist? There are already three options for doing just that.
Sony Ericsson lets you create a virtual Christmas tree that features pictures of you and your (Facebook) friends that appears once you wave your mobile phone in front of a web camera. Though shown working with a Sony Ericsson phone, it probably works with any mobile phone, as long as its screen is bright enough:
ARWishes, on the other hand, is a web application from Inglobe Technologies (of AR-media fame) that lets you attach holiday related 3d animation to holiday related AR markers and send them as a greeting card to your friends:
ARWishes is not focused solely on Christmas greeting cards, and is set to capture the augmented reality greeting cards market (yeah, I made that up). It already features some new-year and birthday cards, and I guess Kwanzaa and Hanukkah cards are just around the corner.
If you prefer beer over eggnog, maybe sending branded Stella Artois holiday cards is the right choice for you (but you must be over 18 to create them). The best thing about Stella Artois application is that for each card sent, they will protect one tree from being chopped down.
Judging from Halloween, we can expect many more AR applications this coming Christmas. I’m willing to bet someone will create an application the puts a Santa Claus beard around your face, and I’ll be here to cover it, when it happens! Oh right, Microsoft and Ubisoft have done just that last year, and Talking Dog Studios have it covered this year:
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.
Our inaugural post from early 2008: “Top 10 AR demos that will…” sparked huge interest. Since then, we have witnessed loads of AR games swarming the market.
Well, that may be an exaggeration – but the industry has certainly transitioned from delivering mere demos to actual games; from proof of concepts to commercial products; from “Yay” to “W00t!”
We have covered these AR games before, but Today is your chance to choose.
Vote for your all time favorite augmented reality games!
Our only rules for nomination:
1) It’s a fun game
2) It registers computer graphics on reality
3) It runs on commercial off the shelf hardware.
Here are the 18 nominees in chronological order (when first surfaced on the web):
go!
1. The Invisible Train
2004 – Graz University (PDA, Gizmondo)
2. Catapult
March 2006 – Gizmondo (Gizmondo)
3. Eye of Judgment
May 2006 – Sony (Sony EyeToy)
4. AR Tennis
June 2006 – Fanta/HIT Lab NZ (Nokia)
5. WizQubes
March 2007 – MXR
6. Level Head
October 2007 – Julian Oliver (webcam)
7. ARis
July 2008 – Geisha Entertainment (Webcam)
8. Kweekies
October 2008 – Int13 (Nokia, iPhone)
9. Ghostwire
October 2008 – A Different Game (Nintendo DSi, Nokia)
10. Tower of Defense
December 2008 – Sergey Ten
11. Topps
March 2009 – Total Immersion (Webcam)
12. Scope
March 2009 – Frantz Lasorne (Goggles)
Vodpod videos no longer available.
13. Do the Dip
April 2009 – MacDonald’s (webcam)
14. ARhrrrr!
May 2009 – GA Tech and SCAD-Atlanta (Nvidia Tegra)
15. Candy Wars
May 2009 – GA Tech and SCAD-Atlanta(Gizmondo)
16. Art of Defense
May 2009 –GA Tech (Nokia)
17. RubberDuckzilla
May 2009 – Oasis (webcam)
18. InVizimals
June 2009 – Sony (PSP)
-*-*-*
Which are your favorites?
Share with your friends and find out their favorites! (share button at top right of page)
Before going on with our scheduled linkfest, I would like to pose a question to my readers. Am I updating too much, or not enough? How many augmented reality related posts would you like to read per week? Your opinion is important to me, so please comment away on this topic.
Now, without further ado, here’s this week’s linkfest.
From Total Immersion comes this web application that enables you to summon a virtual Disney dragon. I think the more interesting angle here is that Total Immersion has registered a domain named dfusionathomeapps.com.
Sony’s Play Station 3 motion controller lets you play with virtual swords (if you happen to have a few cameras installed around your living room).
If you are invited, you can try Roque’s new rings collection by wearing an AR marker on your finger. The technology comes from Holition, which specialize in using augmented reality for promoting jewelry. (via Not Just Reality)
if you put a marker on something inadequate (for example an oily food box) and fail to produce both a nice game logic and fancy design, augmented reality becomes totally obsolete. Driven by nothing. And because I am driven by augmented reality I don´t want immersive “campaigns” to be as attractive as a modem.
This augmented reality video comes from Berio Molina Quiroga thesis project for the Computer Graphic Design Masters at Rochester Institute of Technology. It’s called Augmented Sound, but I fancy the drawing process much better than the auditory results. You can find more information over here.
Yet another quick post, just before I go to (my real) work. Sony is developing its own AR game for a camera enhanced PSP, named InVizimals. A combination of GhostWire and int13’s Kweekies, players have to hunt around their houses for monsters, and later can set the monsters to fight each other. I really like how they combine the player’s real world actions (casting a shadow, shaking the PSP, etc.) in the gameplay.
Welcome to the late evening keynote of the second day of ISMAR ’08 in Cambridge.
The keynote speaker is Diarmid Campbell, from Sony Computer Entertainment Europe (London), and heads its research on camera gaming. And we are covering it in real time.
Diarmid comes on stage. the crowed is going crazy…
The talk: Out of the lab and into the living room
What a camera game? Simply put, you see yourself in the camera and add graphics on top.
The trouble with the brain: it fixes things you see (example of a checkerboard, a black square in the light has the same color as a white square in the dark.)
Background subtraction is the first thing you try to do. Using this technique, Diarmid superimposes him self in real time on top of…the ’70 super band ABBA…
User interface motion buttons – use virtual buttons that the user activates. The response is not as robust, but it’s more responsive.
Example of EyeToy Kinetic
Next is a demonstration of vector buttons and optical flow.
You have to keep the control on the side – otherwise the player’s body will activate it unintentionally.
It turns out Sony decided not to use this control…not just yet.
A similar control was actually published in Creature Adventures available online. Diarmid struggles with it. The crowed goes wild. Diarmid: “You get the idea…”
Good input device characteristics: Many degrees of freedom, non-abstract (player action=game action), robust and responsive.
Camera games have been accused in the past for not having depth (too repetitive). There are 2 game mechanics: skill based (shoot the bad guy) and puzzle based. This could become shallow – unless you deliver on the responsiveness and robustness.
To demonstrate color tracking, Diarmid dives into the next demo (to the pleasure of the audience…). For this demo he holds 2 cheerleader pompoms…
“It’s like a dance dance revolution game, so I also have to sing and occasionally shout out party…”
The crowd is on the floor.
See for yourself –
We are on to drawing games, Sketch Tech. He draws a cow that is supposed to land on a banana shaped moon. He succeeds!
Using a face detector from Japan, here is a Head Tracking game: a green ball hangs from his mouth (a pendulum) and with circular moves of his head he rotates it, while trying to balance it…
Eye of judgment, a game that came out last year (bought out by Sony) relied on a marker based augmented reality technology. It is similar to a memory game, with a camera and a computer, and cards.
We are starting to wrap up and Diarmid summarizes, credits Pierre for setting up all the hardware, and opens the floor for questions.
Question: How do you make the game interesting when you’re doing similar gestures over and over again…
Diarmid: When the game is robust and responsive – you’ll be surprised how long you can play the game and try to be better.
Blair MacIntyre (from the audience): Robust and learn-able is what makes the game fun over time.
Question: Is there anything more you can tell us about the depth camera? Will it be available soon to consumers?
Diarmid: No.
The crowed bursts into loughs.
Blair (jumps in from the audience) There is a company called 3dv in Israel which offers such a camera. It’s not cheap or as good as discussed before, but you can get it.
Q: What’s special about camera games beyond novelty?
Diarmid: The 2 novel aspects of camera games are that it allows you to see yourself, and you can avoid the controller. Camera games are also great for multi-players.
Q: Is there a dream game you’d like to see?
Diarmid: Wow, that’s hard…I worked on a game before Sony called The Thing based on Carpenter’s movie. It was all about trust. The camera suddenly opens up the ability to play with that. When people see each other, the person to person interaction is very interesting and hasn’t been explored in games.
Q: will we see camera games on PSP?
Diarmid: there is a game in development, and I don’t know if I can talk about it…
Q: when I look in the mirror I am not so comfortable with what I see…how do you handle that?
Diarmid: We flip the image. It’s hard to handle a ball, when just looking at the mirror.
Games Alfresco 
