augmented.org

After we all laughed about the guys from Tonchidot, as mentioned before, there is a new company and new hope around. Even with a nice pun name that does not give you a hard AR headache. Easy to remember and it says what it does: puts a layer on your real world: talking about augmented reality that runs on your mobile device and gives you real-time information about e.g. tourist attractions for now in Amsterdam, or the next coffee shop Starbucks around or your buddy’s location walking one block away… Why it is worth mentioning is the fact, that it runs on all Android phones, will be available free of charge and it allows users and companies to add their own content. If there will be a proper SDK with nice features, I can already smell hundreds of location based fun applications around.

Take a closer look at the first video at http://layar.eu/.

A new game for the Playstation Portable was announced. Using the camera they allow you to see animals appear on your desk and it looks like a beat-em-up multiplayer. Interesting is the use of new interaction paradigms, like blowing (trigger a storm), shaking (earthquake) or shading your animal friends. The only thing I don’t understand is how they want to find invizimals running around in your home - without a placed marker or anything. This just can’t work and sounds like a hyped PR material video, that will never be seen like that at the customer’s. Or at least not yet… The PSP does not bring a full fine grained GPS or similar. How do they want to track the correct position? I doubt that they actually use a fully fleashed feature tracking within the device, just using the medium quality connectable webcam. But besides, a neat vision, that finally looks cool and brings multi-player! Check it out.