Weekly Linkfest

As you might have noticed, I’ve been on hiatus from blogging for the last couple of weeks, but hopefully I’ll have more time on my hands from now on. I haven’t really kept track of what’s happening in the AR Sphere in the last week, so sorry if this linkfest seems a bit anemic (and sorry if you sent me a link by email and I forgot to publish it)

  • Flash has FLARToolkit. Silverlight developers, please welcome the SLARToolkit.
  • MIT’s Technology Review on TAT’s Recognizr.
  • Which leads nicely to this demo of Comverse’s mobile face recognition application. It’s not really AR (though it was celebrated as such), but I guess it can be useful in conferences.
  • Augmented tombstones. I actually think this will become common in 80 years or so when the internet generation will get disconnected for a final last time.
  • Another projected map concept by designaffairs studio (via toxel.com).
  • Total Immersion and your fingers power a halfpipe skiing game.
  • And finally, Glow is an iPhone app that will let you see how your friends are feeling, which could go very nicely with TAT’s recognizer but makes do with a browser like augmentation.

This week’s video is waiting for me to blog about for more than a week. But Toby beat me to it (damn hiatus!). It’s called Imersive Rail Shooter and it’s the work of one David Arenou. And it’s real. If you want to read more about it (and that’s a sure thing after watching the video), you can find more details on Augmented.org.

Have a great week!

Weekly Linkfest

Yep, I was too busy this week to write posts, and the coming week doesn’t seem to be better. Luckily, there’s always the weekly linkfest, where I can point to news stories that I haven’t covered this week (some of those you might have seen if you are following me on twitter):

The weekly video is of a concept application that merges historical photographs of buildings with the images captured by a mobile phone. Created by the Dutch MonkeyPunch group it shows what could happen if Microsoft will add a web interface to their latest batch of Photosynth features:

Your Face Is A Social Business Card

Last July TAT (“The Astonishing Tribe“) posted a concept video of their augmented social face-card system (okay, I made that term up, what else should we call it?).  The video tickled the imagination with over 400,000 views.

TAT has since teamed up with Polar Rose, a leading computer vision services company, to turn that concept into a reality.  The TAT Cascades system combined with Polar Rose’s FaceLib gives us this prototype called Recognizr.

It’s nice to see the technology is coming together, but I wonder how the social and ethical repercussions will play out.  My guess is the only way this will truly work is to be paired with one of the big social networks like Facebook or LinkedIn.  That way you have your protected status built into your social information.

But then it becomes less useful for business or conference settings, which is where I see the biggest use (and as they demonstrated in the concept video.)  So if the access to your information connected to your face is customizable and controlled by you, then it probably won’t cause too much heartache.  Hopefully, we’ll see a real product from them soon.  Having the Recognizr system available at ARE2010 in June would be fantastic.

TAT Augmented ID is Beautiful/Creepy

One of the oldest concepts in the mobile AR community is using augmented reality to match a person with his/her identity. The Swedish software and design company TAT just unveiled their own take on this “augmented id” with the aptly named Augmented ID. Using face recognition and tracking technology from Polar Rose, TAT enables you to check up one’s web identity by looking at him through your mobile’s camera, as the following concept shows:

It’s very pretty, but just be sure that before pointing your mobile at some beautiful girl on the street, you could out-run her boyfriend. (via engadget)