Ad Busting and Android AR Competition

Ad Busting BP

BP AR

As the cruel oil rig disaster of BP continues to spill oil all over the bay, beaches and birds, activists and artists start to think of new ways of ad busting and stigmatizing companies, to be seen on the black list sooner and longer. This social hacking raises awareness for the problem and burns the bad management of this biggest environmental accident ever – with Augmented Reality.

Mark Skwarek and Joseph Hocking showed us their new project
the leak in your home town, where you
can see even more oil leaks with your iphone:

Mark:

We are using the iPhone to create site-specific art work about the BP oil spill. Basically the work lets the viewer see the broken pipe and oil anytime they see a BP logo. The viewer aims their iPhone at any BP logo and what they will see is the broken oil pipe come out of the BP logo. Out of the broken pipe comes the oil, pluming upward.

They nicely reuse BP’s own logo to turn it against them and show us how we get a powerful means of expression, that’s safe and nondestructive. So to speak, social Hacking AR Graffiti. I’m sure that we will be hearing more of Mark and his team – they do a nice job of coming up with concepts to invade the real world. :)

Technologywise you currently need the black square with your marker around the logo, but their team is working on a new feature tracking solution without the need of the fiducial border. They are even trying to bring the first version to the AppStore… I’ll cross my fingers, but as soon as BP and Apple become aware of ad busting apps, I doubt the permission getting granted. This kind of decision affects all AR browsers anyway… also junaio is willing to offer user generated 3D content… let’s see, what Steve says this time about censorship.

Qualcomm AR Competition

Qualcomm is pushing AR for their mobile android platforms. They are going to launch their AR SDK this fall. It will allow vision based tracking (and thus AR with the video in the back) and they want to foster this even more by reaching out to developers:

They start a contest for the best AR app, using their new SDK. First prize is $125000. Check out the announcement to get ready before it’s released! To start off, be sure to sign up for the closed beta. I sure did!

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