Weekly Linkfest

Posted on July 10, 2011 by rouli

How are terracotta warriors, billiard, a coloring book and the city of Basel all related to each other? Well… they are featured in this week’s linkfest:

This week’s video is just strange.

An augmented reality artwork created by John Goto and Matthew Leach using the Layar platform, Gilt City confronts the banking crisis in an unusual way. Famous beggars appear on your mobile’s screen, and you choose whether to help them, or make them explode. Art – I’ll never understand it, but maybe you will, by reading more about this project here.

Have a grand week!

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The Best of the Best in Augmented Reality Compete for Top Industry Award

Posted on April 26, 2011 by Ori Inbar

Industry icons Bruce Sterling, Vernor Vinge, Will Wright and Jaron Lanier to judge “The Auggies” – at the worldʼs largest AR event.

Register Today!

SANTA CLARA, CA (April 26, 2011) – The Augmented Reality industry is getting ready to show off a new round of innovation to the technology, media, and marketing communities.  If you ever wondered about the potential of Augmented reality and wanted to check it out up close, you will be excited to know that “The Auggies” returns to the world’s largest augmented reality event, ARE 2011 at the Santa Clara Convention Center in California. The second annual Auggies competition will take place at the heart of Silicon Valley as the brightest minds in the industry put on a show to impress the industry’s most iconic judges and inspire the audience packed with AR enthusiasts.

The thing I like best about ARE is personally witnessing things that never show up on the Internet. There’s a tension in Augmented Reality, between the global scope of the technology and the local character of the teams that produce it. When you’re in the room with committed, creative people — looking them in the eye, breathing the air they are breathing — that’s what makes it an “event.”

– said Bruce Sterling.

For the Auggies competition, augmented reality teams get 5 minutes each on stage and compete for the coolest live AR demo. The panel of judges provides their unabashed comments, critiques and if they are deemed worthy praise. Winners will be voted by the audience and receive the prestigious “Auggies Award.”

The Auggies is the opportunity for AR developers to unveil their vision of the future, not only in terms of technical progress, but also on how creative you can be with this technology. Winning is truly an important recognition from the AR community and it surely means you’re defying the norm and taking one step further.

– said Ivan Franco of YDreams – the 2010 Auggies winner.

Nominations for live demonstrations at the 2011 Auggies include: Previznet, Georgia Tech, Mobilizy, Whistlebox, Ogmento, Metaio, Vertigore, and Occipital.

The competition is still open for additional nominations until May 10th.

The only way to witness the yearly AR battle for the Auggies and participate in the live audience voting is to register for the ARE 2011 event. Event registration is limited and does sell out.

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YDreams Interactive Booth at Maximidia Fair

Posted on October 8, 2010 by thomaskcarpenter

In the future, everything will be interactive: walls, toilets, hammers, cars, small dogs…

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Weekly Linkfest

Posted on June 6, 2010 by rouli

As expected, this linkfest is full of ARE2010 stuff:

This week’s video is not from ARE2010, but cool nonetheless. EXMAR is a conceptual periscope-like device that attaches to your mobile phone and lets you see an augmented view of your surrounding without pointing directly at anything. It’s great for minimizing hand strain, looking behind you and admittedly for perverts. Created by students at Korea’s KAIST institute, the related paper was submitted to ISMAR10 but is not available online as far as I can tell

Have a great week, see you back on the 20th (unless my flight will be canceled again).

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Weekly Linkfest

Posted on May 30, 2010 by rouli

The last weekly linkfest before the augmented reality event, and the last one in the next couple of weeks. Here’s what happened this week in the world of augmented reality:

This week’s video is a video presentation for QderoPateo’s Ouidoo, the articulated naturality device. I don’t know if it’s official, but seeing this video I understand why the avoid using the term augmented reality. A much better term is surrealism:

Have a great week, see you in ARE2010!

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Weekly Linkfest

Posted on November 8, 2009 by rouli

Still waiting for Junaio.

In the meantime the backlash against augmented reality (and the hype bubble surrounding it) has begun, with PSFK’s “Is Augmented Reality The Next Second Life?”, Fast Company’s “Put Your Phone Down: Augmented Reality Is Overblown” and Techdirt’s critique of gimmicky AR applications. Even Zugara has called on bloggers to cool down the hype. The best of its kind is BusinessWeek’s “Augmented Reality: Getting Beyond the Hype” (you should read this article):

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.

Oh, and in other news:

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):

Have a nice week!

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Weekly Linkfest

Posted on November 1, 2009 by rouli

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.

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.

Have a nice week!

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Weekly Linkfest

Posted on September 27, 2009 by rouli

Let’s try to make this week’s linkfest as concise as possible:

  • Tish Shute interviews Bruno Uzzan, CEO of Total Immersion for UgoTrade.
  • Blair Mcintyre: “Has AR taken off? Is it finally here?“, check out the quote below.
  • Augmented reality tested on board the international space station, to help astronauts in maintenance tasks.
  • Another pseudo-AR game whose goal is to catch ethereal creatures – Fairy Trails.
  • Intel looks into augmented reality devices.
  • Total Immersion (those from the first bullet) created a bumping-cars game for Six Flags.
  • You know that AR is really hot when (French) politicians start to use it in their press conferences (powered again by Total Immersion).

AR Browsers:

Ad campaigns of the week:

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:

boof! that was a long one!
Have a nice week!

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Weekly Linkfest

Posted on August 23, 2009 by rouli

Hope you didn’t miss the weekly linkfest’s early edition, published yesterday, covering some of the best articles, posts and talks that were published during the week. Here are some more interesting bits from around the AR ecosystems making news this week:

And finally, this week video comes from Hongik University of South Korea. It shows a project named “Will be”, created in 2004 (and presented in ISMAR05), which is the augmented reality take on a story board. It’s quite nice, though some of the features could have been more accessible if they were implemented via standard GUI, rather than ARUI:

Have a nice week!

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Boy Meets Girl Remake: Virtual Boy Meets Real Girl

Posted on February 26, 2009 by Ori Inbar

YDreams’ Flapi will flip your mind.

You all know the classic story: boy meets girl; girl plays with boy; boy falls in love with girl; girl leaves…

Maria Palma just shared with me YDream‘s take on the story, featuring their virtual Mascot, Flapi the cute, and an even more cute – real girl (the Creative Director’s daughter which totally steals the show).

I like the attempt for drama driven by the interaction between real and virtual.

But I’d love to see this on a portable device. The girl should see Flapi in her field of view avoiding the need to turn her head to watch it on the screen.

YDreams response: they’re thinking about it…

This demo (based on their SimVideo augmented reality platform) and others were presented by YDreams’ CEO, Antonio Camara, at the Digital Signage Expo in Las Vegas this week.

YDreams wasn’t the only AR company to present at the event: Total Immersion made a splash as well.

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