augmented.org

Metaio just sent our their new newsletter, introducing the beta for junaio, their to-be-launched social networking mobile AR browser. Official release will be November, 2nd, but from today on you can take a closer look on their new product on their website and on youtube. Augment your snapshots with 2D and 3D characters or find your way using this mobile guide on your iphone. For what you can see in the video (and what I’ve seen live at metaio’s fair) it is a location-based AR browser, combined with a 3D overlay plus (new to all AR browsers) the social component. I’m wondering what else the social emphasis will bring us in November! Hopefully more than just posting fun shots on facebook. But even though, it would be a great start to trigger it. :-)

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So much for a Tuesday geeky fun post. Just thought, I’d share this. :-) Back to reality now…

The international symposium on mixed and augmented reality closed its doors after a week of augmented craziness. Thanks to the committee for organizing the event and holding it in Florida. I’m sure more and more videos will hit the Internet sooner or later, documenting a bit more of current state of the art augmented reality. And a clap on the shoulder and big thanks to Tish, Ori and Thomas for sharing their impressions (see below for their reports).

• Ori’s epilogue to ISMAR 2009, putting together a top ten impressions list
• Tish’s coverage and summary with pictures of the conference
• Thomas has more on ISMAR, here a special on state of the art HMD hardware

Really nice reads so head over to their pages yourself. It’s 100% worth reading it all. Besides, the AR browser progress, evolving standards, HMD dreams, more advertisement AR and improved tracking - most striking news for me was:

a) Georg Klein (formerly Oxford University AR) went to Microsoft. This will definitively push AR forward, bringing together such a big global player with such a great AR reseacher and coder. Hopefully this will yield in a great new and soon available product, popping out of their research labs… this happened before with 3DVSystems, who were bought by Microsoft and thus created pretty fast the Project Natal outcome. To be released… 2010?

b) Kent Demaine, visual effects god for minority report (see IMDB) showed up at ISMAR, too. oooii is pretty interested in AR and hiring and I like the way thinks get into real-time movie area. I’m totally there. I’m still waiting for my project and proof of concept of an augmented reality television for each viewer to come true. When AR is ready to be used as a previz tool for movie sets - give me a call. Wait, no, give me a call today and I’ll do it for you!!! :)

Best,
Toby.

Cisco shows us their neat idea of a virtual mirror in the video below. I’d love to use it in a retail cloth store, but I’m afraid it’s only a marketing concept video, that points to their new technology conference. Some more videos can be seen on their website. If it were real, we would definitely have seen more footage of the mirror instead of the beautiful actress. But it’s worth a look to see the idea of augmented reality combined with a perfect tracking, overlay, great rendering, occlusion and gesture interaction like in Project Natal. Again, it’s a good sign, though. Designers define interaction concepts and product managers find use cases for AR and push it into their CEO’s and our perception with high quality videos to promote it. I love it.

Earlier I reported on the unfortunate death of the AR android browser gamaray. The team of Clayton Lilly decided to stop the development and focus on other android/smartphone projects. Gamaray was the first open available android AR browser, that would superimpose 3D geometry to your view.

Now the generous team has opened up their sources and put it all on sourceforge. So if you are a software developer, IT student or want to become interested in AR development, this is your chance to learn from them. Go to sourceforge and download the package. Maybe gamaray open source will be around longer than we thought last month.

Besides this piece of news and the running ISMAR, metaio put up a nice video of their fair on September, 28th. Check it out to get a groovy overview of what you’ve seen or missed. (via augmentedblog)

ISMAR is running and draws all attention and time. So, augmented reality blog postings are going down a bit for now, since everbody is just to busy being there physically. :-) As last year Ori Inbar writes a nice first impression collection on his website gamesalfresco. So I won’t quote from there, but encourage you to surf over to his place.

Focus 2009 obviously lies on mobile devices, being iphone, android… and last, but not least, also WinMobile and Nokia’s Symbian OS. (The latter has been treated a bit stepmotherly, even though the first mobile AR demo I’ve seen ran on a symbian phone (at Uni Weimar, Germany)). The before-mentioned markup language ARML gets its discussion and HMDs seem to get pretty popular again as Thomas points out.

To pass the time for the next news from ISMAR, you might want to check out the O’reilly one hour talk with Chetan Damani about augmented reality, iphone apps, acrossair and the future of our favourite emerging technology. Mobile trends are outlined, even RFID detection is discussed shortly. If you survive the bad sound quality, it’s worth tuning in, if you are sitting on your couch, wanting to know some new tiny details. :-)

If you don’t know the meaning of the acronym ISMAR then you must be pretty new to the Augmented Reality scene. But that’s okay! Don’t worry. The International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality is the best place to get the latest news and tech demos for everything that is related to augmented reality. It should ring a bell by now. It has been around for 10 years now (Congratulations for 10th anniversary!) and during this week all augmented eyes are steadily watching Orlando, Florida not to miss the latest anouncement. Be sure to check out the website and see the full schedule here.

Since I’m bound and stuck in Germany (damn!) for another project on stereoscopic VR and AR, I won’t make it. But be sure to get a good coverage (like last year) from Ori and gamesalfresco and also from Thomas with his Digital Life. I will aggregate the latest buzz and news for you here at augmented.org, too. Sure thing! :-)

Enjoy the ride!

Chris O’Shea contacted me and pointed me to their website, that documents a neat street art installation, using some augmented reality in the broader sense. Take a look for yourself: a big screen in the pedestrian zone of Liverpool (so far) that shows a live feed of the street. A digital mirror to see yourself from bird’s eye perspective. But all of a sudden a giant hand will grab you, squash you, move you or tickle you. A hillarious installation you definitively have to check out. Next stop will be Cardiff in Wales.

Although you could moan it’s not really AR, I love to see more of these street arts like this one, the Blinkenlights projector UrbanScreen. Let’s hope for the next version of the Hand from Above with some interaction… maybe we as small tiny ant-like critters can fight back against the greater life form? :-)

Hand from Above from Chris O'Shea on Vimeo.

Just another short post on AR awareness! Meet the London AR community and check out the event Lester and the staff from augmentedplanet are organizing. They are putting together an augmented reality community event in London on November, 11th, for enthusiasts and to show off the latest cutting edge AR works. It’s going to be held in the evening and the main focus will be showing some cool demos and probably sharing some beers. So check it out and/or contribute your work if you happen to be close by or can make it!

Key details:

• Date: 11 November 2009
• Start: 18:00 – 21:00
• Location: All Bar One, 108 New Oxford Street, London WC1A 1HB

Agenda

• 6:00 Registration
• 6:30 Welcome
• 6:45 Event (details to follow)

Registration signup page: http://augmentedplanet.eventbrite.com/
augmented planet web: http://www.augmentedplanet.com/

Cheers!

Lee Brimelow from Adobe’s flash/flex/air department talks at Adobe’s Max 2009 about the usage of Flartoolkit and Papervision to create Flash Augmented Reality applications. So if you are interested in Flash AR development, but somehow never understood the workflow or how the matrix convertion works or just feel like watching a 60 minutes video on this topic, go ahead and lean back! It’s pretty code-near and technical. So expect to see more source than colorful 3D images. :-)

http://tv.adobe.com/watch/max-2009-design/designing-for-augmented-reality/

For an AR pro there is not much in it, but it show us again, that even now workshops at Adobe and other studios are blossoming and that AR is getting easier and easier. Cheers to that!