Weekly Linkfest

Posted on November 22, 2009 by rouli

A slow news week, and I’m not the only one who thinks so. Nevertheless, here are some augmented reality related news from around the web:

Weekly quote comes from the fantastic piece, Augmented Reality Network Crashes, Leaving Millions Dataless, imagining a news article from the future:

“I started chatting with a very nice man in line with me at the deli near by office,” said Chicago resident Sue Spiches. “I was waiting for information about him to pop up on my contact lenses, but it never came. For all I know, he was a registered sex offender or a Mormon.”

And this week’s video comes to us from MindSpace Solutions a spinout company from Hit Lab NZ, which created a device called the Digital Binocular Station. Using extra sensitive sensors in the base station, this pair of binoculars can augmented a museum display (or any other room) in a way unmatched by any of their competitors, or at least that’s what the video suggests. I’ll have to visit New Zealand to try it out (here’s my vote for holding ISMAR 2011 in New Zealand).

Have a great week!

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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 August 16, 2009 by rouli

Last week I published a poll, asking how do you define yourself – are you an engineer, an artist or maybe an Entrepreneur? As of writing this post, 75 readers have answered the poll, 34 of them (45%) identified themselves as engineers. I thought there would be more artists among you (15%), and was surprised by the percent of entrepreneurs (15%). The poll is still open, so you can still cast a vote.
Moving on to the weekly linkfest (it gets bigger every week!) –

  • Metaio blitzed the airwaves with two podcasts – Noora Guldemond (head of sales and marketing) interviews here and Peter Meier, Metaio’s CTO is giving an interview here. Sadly, I haven’t found the time last week to hear them, but I plan to do so in the next few days.
  • And it was a good week for SPRXMobile (Layar) as well. Aparently, Layar comes preinstalled on Samsung’s new Android phone, they were featured on The Financial Times, and things are only going to get better, since they are holding their first Layar event.
  • TweetWorld is Gamaray’s attempt to have an augmented tweeter application, joinning the ranks of Layar and TwittAround.
  • The BBC – Mobile phones get cyborg vision: “Not only could this form of rich, intuitive and easy to grasp data be the next killer app for the mobile, some see it changing our world view forever.“
  • ReadWriteWeb – Augmented Reality: A Human Interface for Ambient Intelligence: “Augmented reality (or AR) is fast becoming as ubiquitous a term as Web 2.0. The field is getting noisier by the day, and AR as a field of research now has to co-exist with its status as an industry buzzword“
  • A short introduction to programming AR applications for the Android OS.
  • Is this the first augmented shirt on Threadless?
  • CrashCorp demos a rudimentry AR application for the iPhone.
  • YDreams and Zugara join the AR consortium (can I join too?)
  • And Zugara (covered previously here) also launched what must be the second augmented reality game on Facebook (since last week Total Immersion had the first), CannonBallz (video). Just four years ago, we would have called this kind of games “Eye Toy” like, but today we have new buzzwords. Still, it is a well produced game.

Our weekly video is of a game created by Circ.us, to promote Chris Angel’s new show, “The five lives of Chris Angel”. Since it’s a puzzle game, and this summer turned me into a brain-dead blogger, I haven’t tried it myself to give an educated review. You, on other hand, can play it here, or just watch the embedded video below:

As always, have a nice week!

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