augmented.org

Of course, that is the usual way: writers, artists and designers create ideas for a movie or a book and make their technological craziness come to life - they don’t have the restrictions the real world brings with its crummy physics and huge atoms. Anyway, I wanted to point you to a new computer game, that also comes along with augmented reality. It’s a serious adult gaming game, where the protagonist also brings his own set of Ray Bans, including the “ARI” - added reality interface. Obviously, this is 100% augmented reality at it’s perfection. It has been before in many other games (HUDs, etc.), though, but here I consider it more featured, since the other parts of the game claim close-to-reality looks. With all the youtube videos on augmented reality and all the android and iphone AR apps swamping the perception of people, I think this kind of “product placement” will also promote the technology, since everyone will say “cool, I wanna have it”. :-) And maybe companies are getting closer to a neat results for HMDs… check out i-Bean to lift your hopes.

See the ARI in “Heavy Rain” at 7:40 min…

Talking about android… As you might have read, layar was officially released. I will post my first try-outs on layar and wikitude during next days. Just received the HTC Hero and now I’m running around, stumbling into lamp posts and banana peels… If I make it home, expect a post. :-)

No technological surprises, but a well made and neat video about a - hopefully sooner than we think available - HMD setup concept by students from Valle Giulia in Italy hit the internet. Nice integration of magic book concepts and interaction techniques. It’s pretty cool and high quality. Check it out to dream a bit more about the future… :-)

Just a short comment today. Rouli made a listing of current AR Browsers and I thought I just add one more, that sounds promising: www.gamaray.com. It is available on the android market and already allows to link 3D graphics. So, it’s pretty nice, not only showing 2D billboards or signs in space. The only company missing in this party are the fellows from metaio, who are still working on their fully fleshed 3D mobile AR browser.

Besides, if you are lonely, feel free to grab a copy of the augmented society girl (not dancing on a box no more, but basically the same). But it will be hard to bring her on a date…

This year is a pretty good year for augmented reality. We’ve seen different demos and ads for movies or new cars, glasses, even women’s hygiene items. Well, okay, I reconsider my statement. It’s a good year for augmented reality awareness. But usually it remains marker based webcam AR or EyeToy-style. Nevertheless, I’m happy that the technology is spreading and people start to know it, thus pushing us and hardware developers forward. Sooner or later people may ask for a cellphone: “so it does not come with a AR-HMD goggle system? Hmmm… well, then I have to go across the street to Compu-Global-Hyper-Mega-Net…”. Another funny game (I consider it only mixed reality) is this one below. Afaik it’s the second that includes facebook! The maybe biggest snowball system for spreading the word!!

If you are more interested in gaming, location based services and augmented reality, you want to check out my interview I gave for a games developer’s community. Unfortunatelly you’d have to speak German… ;-)

If you have a rainy holiday, you might want to switch to the virtual world again and see Paris in 3D on your iPhone! The demonstration runs really smoothly and quickly. If this is for real, please everybody: hurry up and get your iphone ready for augmented reality! Well, erh, Apple, could you please, the video camera access, you know, …? :-)

Or is it? Hopefully, I will find more time to browse through this year’s siggraph papers soon. Unfortunatelly I couldn’t attend, but as it seems to me, there hasn’t been too much on Augmented Reality this year, maybe we have to stick closer to ISMAR and other conferences for our special interest. There was the before mentioned great idea of Bokode presented, where tags and tracking references are stored inside tiny markers, combined with lenslets, visible to out-of-focus cameras; then there was Fraunhofer’s under water AR scenario, I discussed before. And two more neat things, I’d like to show:

First, an OpenCV and ARTag based hand-gesture-tracking add-on for augmented reality. It’s far away from a useful interaction device, but as I like to repeat: once we have proper equipment (like lightweight HMDs), we need other input paradigms, too! We need to think about gestures soon enough, because I don’t want to connect one of these mice to my wrist, when walking through the street, enjoying AR.

Secondly, another flavour of a virtual mirror. Fraunhofer institute did another presentation at last year’s (was it?) CeBit in Hanover, Germany: there we saw sneakers stuck to your feet. This one, nevertheless, is more impressive, since it not only overlays your regular (real life ;-)) shirt, but also bends and distorts as you twist your body.

Technically, it’s not too crazy, since a rectangular pattern is needed on top of the shirt and a real-time chroma keying does the trick for the color. Also, you can’t (or can you and it’s not shown?) switch to a bright shirt color. Hm. But still, it’s a really great close-to-market-release kind of application, that could stand in your next footlocker or Nike superstore soon enough! I’d see those genius iphone runners as a first target group. :-)

Hoping for more videos popping up soon.

Okay, it’s still far from usable for AR scenarios, but I wanted to include this one, nevertheless. Nikon just announced a new coolpix camera, that includes its own pico projector to display 640×480 images at a 2 m distance max. “So what the h…?!” you could say.

But disregarding the fact, that the quality or battery will probaly suck really bad, it’s another option for Augmented Reality scenarios. If good HMDs don’t show up soon, there could be the alternative to project all you need into your field of view. Of course this needs high ANSI-Lumen projections for daylight scenarios and another disadvantage can be the non-existing privacy, you’d have with a HMD. On the other hand this can also be an advantage to share augmented information. If one could run the (video) camera and the projector at the same time, we could do the tracking and distort the projection to fit the user’s perspective. As usual I refer to Oliver Bimber’s team here. :-) I still believe HMDs will be faster to hit the market, but depending on the scenario, maybe there is another way…