In mixed news I’d also like to point to the neat popcode demos, done by young UK company extra-reality. They generated a spin-off of University of Cambridge Research to bring us popcode: with a mobile AR tool, using marker and markerless tracking, overlaying interactive CG content to your texture. The tracking looks pretty stable and works smoothly in the shown demo. Neat!
Interviews with the Pros
If you feel like listening a bit more to two of the Augmented Reality Pros and their visions, check out the below interviews. First one features Robert Rice (Neogence) talking about the Future of AR and mobile systems.
Secondly, we have a short snippet on Ori Inbar (Ogmento and of course the great gamesalfresco). A bit on ARE 2010, ARNY, state of the art in industry and a quick demo on Put A Spell:
So, if you are around in Europe you definitely want to check out metaio’s open house conference to see their latest inventions. It will be on September, 27th, 2010 in Munich, Germany. And again it features the Oktoberfest afterparty. ;-)
Bullet points so far include:
Keynotes & Workshops
Live-Demonstrations & Futures Parlour
Success Stories & Business Models
Latest Developments & Announcements for 2011
… and for the grand finale there will be the ISMAR (International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality), this year going East to Seoul, Korea. Be sure to check back to their website www.ismar10.org for latest news. I’ll also give updates for sure. ISMAR 2010 will take place 13-16th October 2010.
So, a lot of cool demos to be expected for the last part fo 2010!!! :-)
Whew, this has been a long summer gap of 10 days. There is loads of AR, promotional ad-AR going on and some reports hit the web (as Gamesalfresco lists nicely), but I’ve been too busy. Now back on track, I’d like to start with some vision:
ViewNet Augmented Reality Mapping 3D
The ViewNet project is a collaborative R&D projected in the UK. Funded by TSB and EPSRC. I like their concept video on where AR could make a difference for security, forensics, etc. Afterall it’s about information overlay, that otherwise needs to be looked up annoyingly on your palm, laptop, etc. The instant access to data in your surrounding world is shown again nicely:
Besideds, T-Immersion is working heavily on their head tracking and the marketing of the very same cool eye catcher. See it put up for JumboScreens in a stadium. Adding a smile to each face during half breaks joking around with markerless augmentations.
Keiichi Matsuda created this neat video on another day in an augmented tech society. Just great to watch. Quoting the tube: “recently presented at London’s 3D Film Festival at the Barbican. The architecture graduate and filmmaker has imagined a future world overlaid with digital information, whose built environment can be transformed at the touch of a few buttons. ‘The architecture of the contemporary city is no longer simply about the physical space of buildings and landscape,’ says Matsuda. ‘More and more it is about the synthetic spaces created by digital information that we collect, consume and organise; an immersive interface may become as much part of the world we inhabit as the buildings around us.” Enjoy!
I especially love the moment, when the first guy switches off the augmentation and his office/home turns back into the public space. Be sure to have your anaglyph glasses ready! Awesome!
A lot of research flows into the visualization and the automatic segmentation of body volumes in CG. Takehiro Tawara published his latest paper called Interactive Volume Segmentation and Visualization in Augmented Reality. The focus lies on the automatic segmentation, the region growing after setting a seed in 3D space - but what I wanted to display here is of course the AR part.
The combination of a cheap Wiimote and an attached marker cube is a winning combination for an interaction device. In this case, the virtual skull appears in AR on one marker and the device can be used to cut through the layers of the skull. Wiimote comes in handy due to some more interaction control through the buttons. Interaction by moving your hand to move the clipping plane is again a perfect mapping for AR scenarios. I love it.
GOODMagazine put up a funny video on how HMDs with the right technology could allow us to photoshop our reality. Be sure to get a proximity alert for approaching cars and lamp poles! Really neat!
Second, another trial on gesture interaction comes from Spain (Sorry! from Catalunia!).
Third, Thomas interviews Staffan from Maxcware, who’s developing his own cheap AR goggles, since industry is just not taking the ball seriously, that’s been in their court for a while now. Staffan and his team are working on HMDs and you can contribute in their open source project! Worth a look!
A couple of weeks ago I had a nice chat with Brian Patterson, Advisor at Exhibit Edge, on AR and how the technology impacts their booths and shows. They put up a show using junaio. I decided to let him share his thoughts on AR in a today’s guest post on augmented.org.
The company is a trade show service, working in Washington D.C., Virginia, Maryland and beyond. From building trade show exhibits to handling exhibit management, they cover a wide range of offerings for the trade show exhibit industry.
Now I’ll pass the keyboard to Brian:
Brian:
For as long back as records have been kept on the human race, there have indications that people have gathered en masse to display, demonstrate, buy, and sell goods and services. One of the modern versions of these gatherings are the foundation of the industry I have worked in for the past 10+ years – trade shows.
Although I’m nowhere near an expert in AR, I’ve long been fascinated by it, so I was really excited when my hobby recently collided with my day job. A client of ours was planning to exhibit at an event that was integrating Junaio, and so we were asked to work with them to ensure that their exhibit utilized the technology to full effect.
For those unfamiliar, I’ve provided the demo video below that Junaio put together on how their browser can be used by Trade Shows and exhibitors.
Trade Show changes
I haven’t seen any ideas, techniques, or technologies that could be as big of a game changer as I think AR could have to the Trade Show Floor. The trade show floor is fun, exhilaration, and chaotic… and its remained unchanged for many years. Tightly integrating AR into both the event as a whole as well as all of the individual exhibits really changed the entire experience, making it more streamlined, organized, and interactive. Although there was a light learning curve with the attendees, most took in in good stride since it was a technical crowd. After getting through the bugs, the AR really enhanced the experience for everyone. We noticed people found there way around a lot more easily, interaction between attendees was higher because they had a natural ice breaker, and exhibitors were able to demo products in ways they never could have in the past. Attendees could navigate to a booth using junaio to guide them, and then watch a product literally come to life through the browser on their own phone.
The Trade Show and Our Client’s Utilization
I would love to share exactly how our client was able to implement AR into their booth, but unfortunately our company is under NDA due to their business (they are in the defense/aerospace arena). Speaking broadly about our implementation, it is very similar in concept to the LEGO demonstrations in the YouTube video (@29 seconds in), but it became much more compelling (in our opinion) because of the complex machinery the client sells. At trade shows, the clients hand out a slick sheet with service and product information. We used AR to allow this sheet to come to life, where a few of the images on the modified sheet would be viewable in 3D through the junaio browser.
To take full advantage of the Trade Show’s wide adoption of junaio, we also made QR Codes at the entrance/exit points of the booth very visible. These QR Codes linked directly to company and product information that the client was sharing. While I don’t think this is nearly as compelling as AR for product demonstrations, I do think that it is worthwhile to do since it is very easy to implement and may help a few people remember you that would otherwise not take a slick sheet.
Based on the metrics we keep, we discovered that augmented reality increased interactivity and ‘staying time’ in the booth by over 50%. This change in engagement can mean the difference between landing a client or not, and in the high margin business the client serves, that is incredibly important. Although it did take a large amount of work for us to brainstorm and implement the AR usage within the booth, seeing the engagement jump so dramatically really showed us that AR was more than just a toy, it’s a powerful marketing tool that’s uses are just being uncovered.
Final Thoughts
It was clear that all of the companies exhibiting were very new to using AR, and many decided not to use it at all. If they read this article, and discover they missed out on a tool that could have drastically increased their engagement rate, I’m guessing they’ll be regretting the decision to forgo the technology.
Reflecting back on the whole event, we were very satisfied with the outcomes. If we were to do it all over again, I think we would probably spend more time figuring out exactly how QR codes could be deeply integrated into our booth so that attendees left with more information about us and kept us in the forefront of their minds. I also think that, with more time, we would have used more AR, including larger demonstrations on flat-panel TV’s rather than just on smartphones.
As more people in our industry because aware of the uses of AR, I’m sure we’ll see some very exciting implementations. I can imagine large-scale product demonstrations and interactive AR as some of the starting points, but as I’m sure all of the readers of this site are aware – the surface of AR is just being scratched and possibilities are endless. This type of AR excites me the most because it is a practical business implementation that improves upon a long standing medium. I can’t wait to see what they come up with next for AR + Trade Shows!
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.
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:
The Technical University Munich and its great AR department show another neat demonstration on mobile augmented reality, using a HMD, marker tracking and marker tool interaction. Without further ado I guess it’s best, if you just take a look:
Once again, a nice prototype, that lets us peek into the future. With all these virtual goods, farmville addictions and a general virtualization of belongings it’s just consequent to some day augment your pets or flowers. Of course, we don’t really want to live in a gray world, where it’s only beautiful through a HMD. But especially for that reason, it’s worth thinking about the possible impact of technology. What about future born “AR natives”? Will they redefine real objects? Will they consider virtual plants as valid as physical plants? Well, this is another long discussion.
If you’re not into plants, you can take another look here:
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?
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.
