augmented.org

Dear blogosphere and AR-community,

since my company spend all its money on a great and splendid Christmas party for all of us, there was unfortunately no money left over to buy a proper Christmas tree for the office. Anyway, it would be a shame to slay down a beautiful tree just for a few days of cosiness during office hours. Thus, our research team put up an augmented tree to fill the void. Turn on your favorite carols and enjoy the snow! Of course with actually-working glass balls.

Besides, I’ll make it quick on updates, since the season is forcing me to pack my bags and the real presents.

• metaio joins in for a nice Santa’s skiiing game! Take a shot!
• Cosmin Ghiurau posted a longer entry on the snow flake-catch-with-your-tongue AR game Rosetta. It’s a neat idea, but with my tiny camera detection was a bit flawed.
• Thomas writes a list on the 10 worst AR demos of 2009.
• While Rouli continues his great list of 2010 predictions and guest postings by the AR community, as mentioned before. Issue #8 is featuring me, by the way. :-)
• Augmented Planet reveals their results on the Best Augmented Reality Applications of 2009. Go and take a look!

Hope you enjoyed 2009 and all the AR news and blog posts as much as I did. If nothing too crazy drops into the sphere between the years, expect me to be back on January, 4th!

All the best,
Toby.

Probably we will get some more eCards using AR during the holiday season, showing the cutting edge style of different companies. But, hey! I dig it a lot and love to see more of it to see what the creative agency people accomplish with the limited papervision + flash augmented reality engine. Just today I got a card, leading me into a neat little toy store I wanted to share with you:

http://www.damashekconsulting.com/happyholidays/

I was intrigued about what will happen in AR once I’ve found the key in the toy store world with the sleeping old man. It reminds me of The Incredible Machine toying around with stuff and triggering physics. I don’t want to spoil, but I have to admit the AR part is nothing too crazy. But have fun!

Besides, I stumbled upon two nice AR videos (via development memo for ourselves) that caught me. One is showing a rocket and a can of fuel, where you have to fill up the rocket by moving the can, eventually letting it hit the sky, the other shows us twisting flexible DNA, attached to two markers. Both have one great thing in common: they go beyond “displaying 3D on a glyph”. They actually let you interact and make clever use of multiple markers. This is, what I’d love to see more! We are still stuck with the annoying open-pdf-print-marker-hold-it-in-front-of-camera, but here it truly integrates a (somehow) natural interaction with virtual objects, that is lacking soo many AR demos. (Okay, this is a bit unfair, there have been more than one, esp. in the area of AR music generation, twisting markers for pitches or sounds - but it’s still not too many on the web.)

Detecting two or more markers with ARToolkit and alike is a no-brainer and the collision/proximity detection is not consuming any CPU power if we are talking about bounding boxes or spheres. These simple add-ons add so much to your AR demo! Please, let us see more in Flash of it! :-)

Hey there,

just a quick one for the start of the week. Since Rouli already blogged on this one, I might as well now - since I try to avoid bragging on my own work. :-) The company I work for, RTT, is a good friend and partner of Nvidia and at their 2009 GPU Technology Conference my boss Ludwig Fuchs presented our AR work with Jen-Hsun Huang from Nvidia. You can see a short presentation of our AR module that nicely combines our photo-realistic 3D look with stable tracking (credits to metaio on this one) plus real-time illumination/shading through a tiny little 180° fisheye camera giving us all the light information from the current room. We will push this even further by releasing real-time postproduction filters and HDR treatment in real-time. Hope you all liked it! More to come! :-)

For further videos you might want to look at RTT’s youtube channel! Cheers!

As AR enthusiasts you might have known before, too. But it’s worth a note! Google has finally come up with their own AR setup for mobile phones, well of course for android powered devices. It’s called goggles and you can grab it from now on through the android marketplace on your phone.

You can either watch the fun concept video with some google engineers, probably from Germany and India for their strong accents ;-), explaining the whole idea - or you grab a copy from the market. (Unfortunately I don’t get it listed in Germany, anybody experienced the same?)

The cool feature besides the usual suspects of location based information using GPS and compass is a broad use of google’s own image search connected with additional information. This means you can “scan” a popular building or simply the cover of a book with your phone’s camera and you will get additional information displayed or propably offers to buy the item or reserve a table in that fancy restaurant above the clouds.

I’m having high hopes with google’s goggles. I have to admit regarding connectivity and usability google usually is pretty good with its concepts. Although the anaglyph glasses as a logo make me expect stereoscopic 3D for the information overlay… Well, maybe google is already working on that, too. Connect the Google HMD to your android and fire up goggles… So this could be the forecast for google entering AR market in 2010. Since the predictions listed by rouli on gamesalfresco already were beaten for 2009. ;-)