augmented.org

During the FIFA world cup and the summer gap, luckily people go outside to meet with their friends, wave their flags and search the best spot to watch the next game with a good projection, a cold beer or with the biggest possible number of fans for the same team. They leave their computers off for a while and are only dependent on their mobiles to find their friends.

Now you get another nice and nerdy option to fiend your new favorite public viewing spot and friends. metaio teamed up with Vodafone and Impire to extend their mobile AR platform junaio to bring you the best AR real-time information on the next beer garden with a big screen or the closest Irish Pub with HD. Once you’ve found a place to watch the game with the new channel called “Wo guckst Du?” (engl.: “where are you watching?”), you can access real-time statistics such as goals, shots on goal, corner kicks, off-sides, penalties, time of possession, passes, fouls, etc., or simply review the team line-up directly overlaid onto the football field.

In their press release they give us even more hope on future AR ideas:

Finally, the match-statistics are also available while you are sitting in the stadium. Having real-time statistics and information about players displayed on the real playground is a glimpse into the future of watching sports. Imagine the possibilities of identifying and tracking single players during the match through the camera of your phone?

Wo guckst Du? – Website

So, go out, enjoy the games and maybe show off with some technology at the side line. ;-)

Since I’m as always pretty excited about projected Augmented Reality, I wanted to point again to the work at MIT MediaLab (Link to Fluid Interfaces and LuminAR currently down): their robotics arm including a camera and a projector is able to project images to the surfaces around you and allows for a gesture interaction. Imagine a small form factor, that looks like a desktop lamp, that includes all your computer hardware!

Regarding mobile Augmented Reality Interfaces, Willem Van den Eynde wrote his thesis on this topic. The demo shows a similar approach as the MIT’s 6th Sense demo (the link to the TED 2009 presentation here). I like the concept of having a wrist attached interface part, where you can drop and store snapshots or other media/augmented items. Moving a marker from your wrist to a desktop computer to transfer all taken photos or a specific one is a neat interaction detail.

A really beautiful demo was done in the Netherlands by DPI New Media for the Netherlands’ largest Energy company. It’s there to let the public come into contact with its green energy initiatives in a playful way. Players take control of the Sun, Wind, Rain and Biomass to provide the little city with electricity (DPI).

It has a shiny cartoony clay look and uses Quest3D and its AR module to get graphical effects like real-time shadows, screen-space ambient occlusion and per-pixel lighting for spotlight effects for the sun:

A great looking project, only improvements I could imagine: first, use a setup that has a better mixed reality feeling to it. I’d rather like to see a physical model landscape that gets augmented with weather effects or other changes… but with a real model below. It just is more fun than a blank table with only markers. Secondly, I’m really hoping for HMD demos soon. The interaction is just more direct and you don’t need to have the look-into-the-mirror-and-act-somewhere-else setting. But for a fair again, it’s obvious to use an easy indestructible-and-hygiene-rules-applying design. :-)

In other news…

… metaio introduces junaio glue, where you will be able to use vision based tracking on your mobile phone to glue 3D objects to any surface. Unfortunately the first concept video does not show the rendering on a device yet. But I’m sure it is only a matter of weeks until we see a running version on youtube.

… and once again 3D outdoor projections go around to impress us in the streets of Amsterdam and on two big buildings (Suntec City Towers) in Singapore.