The Real In Augmented Reality

Although I do not fully agree with the positioning of these guys of being THE experts in (marketing oriented-) AR (I only have heard from them recently, and I for example did NOT like their virtual fitting AKA  “southpark me“), I do absolutely agree with the approach of calming down the hype and starting a discussion about the real in augmented reality. Find the profound and literate analysis of today´s mobile AR applications in this article.

Thank you very much for this good piece of work – tight registration

Scientifically Speaking

I know, in the middle of a hype, you shouldn´t talk about the limitations of mobile AR. Who cares about OS market shares, tight registration (3D in general) or user experience and GUI design, when you can forward a catchy video. While I am thinking about the number in percent of the journalists, who have actually tried out all the popping up applications – you can go through this fantastic historical and scientifically sustainable article by the institute of one of the pioneers in mobile AR :

https://www.icg.tugraz.at/~daniel/HistoryOfMobileAR/

By the way: there are three of the applications / providers mentioned, which offer a promising approach and are appreciated by the author of this blog.

Augmented Kingdom

Once upon a time, there was this information kingdom, ruled by hype cycles and catchy videos. Speed was the currency, quantity was the drug and image was everything. It was the time of virtual birds, twittering the news and rumours in a 15 seconds of fame (and attention) pulse through the venes of the newswires. Some even called it a war when it came to a certain point where the world as it has been known was on it´s way to change. I mean, the way this world was seen. In these times even the most deliberate knights, the warhorses of this visual battle were forced to use the ultimate measure: a demo video !  (drum roll, rolling thunder, pathetic music). And this is the story I want to tell you today…

Another LASAR

Unlike this previous entry the laser in this universitarian work by Alvaro Cassinelli, Daito Manabe, Kuribara Yusaku and Stephane Perrin functions as a scanner for capturing not preset (!) markers and even parts of the body. As they state the “sticky light” can virtually define everything, as long as the contrast has a critical level. Augmented with sound this is very nice technology demo, worth to be mentioned here. Finally, the camera is not used for optical tracking. So it only functions to capture the nice movie: including my favourite hands-on-part…

Via: Wired UK