It’s that time of year again, as the Augmented World Expo has renewed and expanded the annual award for the best of the best in the augmented reality industry, the “Auggies”. Previously consisting of only a single award, the competition now has 6 categories, and Metaio and its partners are competing in 4 of them!
For the next two weeks, awards will be open to public voting in order to narrow down the entries for each category to just 5 finalists. We’re competing against some of the best and most creative apps in the world- we’d love your support. Please take a moment to vote for our entries- individual links are listed below, or just click on one of the category buttons below to go straight to the entry.
We always like to highlight incredible work built on our software, which is why we’re thrilled to tell you about this awesome project from Winnipeg-based Zenfri, “Clandestine Anomaly”. This will be the first mobile game that utilizes vision-based augmented reality, GPS, and actual real-world elements. Check out their video on Kickstarter and help support the launch of this amazing augmented reality game!
metaio | junaio
Seeing things differently: are brands missing the boat with Augmented Reality? [The Drum]
Developer Sander Veenhof merges 3-D printing with Augmented Reality in the Ultimarker [blog]
Ever play Jenga? Ever play Jenga….on Augmented Reality? [JengAR video]
Cronovizor: The AR Time Viewing Machine (powered by Junaio) [video]
Nimlok utilizes Metaio software to visualize custom exhibits in 3-D [whitepaper]
Registration is open for the Augmented World Expo, June 4-5 (formerly ARE). Use code AWE3META to get a special discount, courtesy of Metaio. Come see Metaio deliver unmatched insight on the industry along with the latest and greatest of AR demos, including the brand-new AREngine! [registration]
Meet Metaio at the Augmented Reality Summit, June 20th in London [event site]
Interested in speaking, sponsoring or attending InsideAR, the most exciting event in the augmented reality industry? Contact us! [event site]
pick of the week: Oculus VR used to simulate death by guillotine
From 6th till 8th of May the re:publica – Europe’s biggest conference on digital and social media – took place in Berlin. More than 5.000 attendees discussed three days about internet policy, network neutrality and the future of social media campaigns. The most controversial topic at the moment in Germany are the plans of the Deutsche Telekom, which announced already in the beginning of May, that they will choke the speed of the internet in the nearest future. The hosts of the re:publica, Markus Beckedahl, Johnny (@spreeblick) and Tanja Häusler (@elektrotanja) as well as Andreas Gebhard, called up the participants to appeal to their government to anticipate these plans: “Avoid that the Telekom introduces a 2nd class internet!” Tanja Häusler said: “If we can now afford limitations for the sake of commercial interests, if there are no more protests against these limitations, we have to realize, in fact, that the digital society is growing continously, but still, has no power to public opinion. “
IN/SIDE/OUT – The link between online and offline
The motto of this year reminds of the difficulty to connect people from the online and the offline world: “With this in mind, the motto IN/SIDE/OUT can be read as an upending of the digital society: Facebook is reaching one billion users, established newspapers are folding to the net-based competition, and Twitter, which was once the tool for alternative civilian war correspondence, is being utilised by militaries to communicate their combat targets. While we were always sure that at some point everyone would use the mechanisms offered by Web2.0, the question remains: Who profits in the end? Will citizens embrace obligations of governments and businesses to become more transparent, while at the same time tolerate the non-transparency of those companies which form the structures of the internet? Or will we soon pull the plug and return to a place where privacy is tangible again? Will we replace the INternet with an OUTernet?”
Sascha Lobo: Who’s afraid of Augmented Reality?
Lobo is one of Germany’s most established digital avantgardists, working as an author, columnist and speaker on digitial issues and net politics. He held his keynote on Monday not without mentioning an amazing technology such as augmented reality is. He is fascinated in AR, but honestly understands the fear of people, who don’t know what to expect about it: “It’s like the radioactivity of Internet. There has to come up a lot of awareness training on augmented reality in the future. At the moment it provokes fear on this invisible, unknown power. There is still an anxiety for the merge of the digital and real life.” He himself is enthusiatic about Ingress, an augmented reality game produced by NinanticLabs, which he played passionately in the last weeks: “It’s the most ‘nerdy’ game one can imagine.” Unfortunately, Ingress “guzzles” a lot of energy, but is lot of fun, he said.
Francesco Lapenta: A Critical look on Augmented Reality
Yesterday I’ve visited Francesco Lapenta‘s presentation with the amazing title “Mediated Life after Virtualization. A Critical Look at the Scenarios Forecast by New Wearable Augmented Reality Visualization Technologies.” He agreed so far with Lobo, that there is still a huge insecurity according to new wearable devices which are visualizing information. People usually have six senses and he imagines that all these senses should be combined in one mobile (augmenting) device such as for example Google Glass and giving real added value to people: “Our Augmented Reality device could interact with these machines, and there could be competetional power of different senses which could interact with your vision and offers you help to learn more.” But what does it really mean for us? He asked: “What will follow the inevitable technological peak and demise of old communication technologies such as the mobile and the screen? If the mobile embodied the newly acquired freedom from the constrained spaces of earlier mediated communications? New “seamless” and “immersive” technological evolutions will acquire social, cultural and market dominance while cannibalizing previous technological milestones very much like television did with photography, radio and cinema, and the computer did with them all. what are the consequences of a technology that does not pretend anymore to “simulate” reality or its visualization but now “naturally” creates the way we see the world and experience it?”
If you want to see the whole presentation, please watch the video:
I still feel overwhelmed by all these very great sessions at the re:publica and would like to recommend the #rp14 to you taking place on the May 5 – 7, 2014 in Berlin.
There was not enough time for me to attend in all events and if you are interested as well, we can also follow the re:publica YouTube channel with all presentations and keynotes.
It’s that time of year again when voting begins for all of the panels everyone has submitted to South by Southwest Interactive. Even if you’re not planning on attending South by Southwest Interactive, you can still support metaio by making your voice heard in the community voting!
Take a quick minute to create a PanelPicker account (if you don’t have one) and then link straight to these two great panels that feature metaio projects and use-cases:
In order to engage with a younger, tech-savvier audience, Toyota launched an integrated marketing campaign for the 2012 Toyota Corolla that featured emerging technology like 2-D print activation and vision-based mobile augmented reality to leverage its existing yet scarcely-downloaded mobile app, the Toyota Shopping Tool. It also features an entirely digital open-source anime pop-star sensation named Hatsune Miku.
Toyota saw huge successes as a result: Corolla leads jumped 30% the week of the lauch; Toyota Shopping Tool mobile app downloads increased 600%; website traffice for the first week increased 167% and continued at an all time high for the next seven weeks.
In this proposal, learn how the interactive director of a multicultural agency and the project lead for an augmented reality company worked together to make this campaign a huge success for Toyota, culminating in a Multicultural Excellence Award.
The lady of the house is often the one picking the décor and design at home. If she can see a ductless system in her house virtually, thanks to augmented reality, sales rise — and have they ever. Using custom mobile apps integrated with emerging technology, such as augmented reality and a custom app store, Mitsubishi Electric Cooling & Heating is revolutionizing the way its sales channel members do business. Tools in hand, Mitsubishi Electric is projecting an increase of $30 million in revenue next year, while simultaneously decreasing future costs for printing and distributing product catalogs by millions of dollars.
Mitsubishi Electric’s products can save homeowners 30-percent on their energy bill, but most just want to know, “What is it going to look like in my house?” Augmented reality is Mitsubishi Electric’s most visual tool in its custom app store that will deploy 11 new enterprise apps for a variety of specific needs in its sales channel.
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Voting starts today and continues to the end of the month, so tell your friends!
Share on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Reddit, Digg, Myspace, Friendster, IRC….basically whatever you want.
While you’re at it, vote for anything else you think is cool!
Outside voting counts for 30% of the selection process, so help us get to SXSW so we can bring these great panels to life!
Mobile devices are evidently the warmest place to hide.
metaio had the opportunity to develop this very cool mobile application with Universal Pictures to promote the highly-anticipated prequel to the 1982 John Carpenter cult-classic of the same name, out in theaters October 14th. We wanted to create a game that drew on the same suspense, horror, and isolation of the film while generating excitement for its release.
After downloading and launching the free THE THING: Flamethrower application for Android or iOS, players assume the role of one of the surviving Antarctic scientists, trapped in a virtual laboratory and assailed from all sides by creepy alien hybrid versions of their former colleagues.
Sounds like fun, right?
We really mean all sides, because this game is played in 360 degrees- players will have to move their mobile device in real life to defend themselves from the attacking aliens. FYI- it’s dark, the lighting quality is very poor, and you only have a limited amount of flamethrower fuel.
Try to hold out as long as you can, but as fans and people familiar with the film know- it’s very difficult to survive THE THING.
After playing, check out the INFECT YOURSELF feature that uses our advanced Facial Recognition AR capability. Watch as THE THING literally rips your face apart. Even Danika of @twitt_AR fame succumbed to the crafty invasive life form:
This game utilized metaio’s advanced Mobile SDK, the most comprehensive solution to create Augmented Reality applications for iOS and Android. Featuring a high-level API and the latest image recognition technologies, it allows developers to produce high-quality applications with low effort. And best of all: we’re releasing a free version in the near future.
Once again- the film hits theaters this Friday, October 14, so get out to your local cinema and happily cringe to this great horror thriller that more than does justice to the 1982 film.
For more info, check out the press release and don’t forget to download this amazing game.
South by Southwest Interactive 2012 might seem far off, but the voting deadline for panels is quickly approaching. I am happy to say that metaio is participating in four different potential panels, and we’d really like to see them get a great response from our followers. We’ve got some very cool topics in the works, so we’d really appreciate your support! You can vote for as many panels as you like, so please be generous. Make sure to create an account, it only takes a few minutes- just click on the titles of the panels below to go straight to the voting page!
Augmented Reality promises the future, but who is actually building new things with it? How are they making any money? As new projects demand six-figure budgets, can privacy rights, humanistic design and fun coexist with user metrics, brand messaging and a lust for “k-factor”? We’ll take a look at what’s been built, why it did and how we might design better games for players and clients alike moving forward.
Every new project is defined by the business practices that enable them. So why do so many Augmented Reality experiences fall short of the expectations of both the buyer and end user? With dissatisfied clients and rumors of low ROI, perhaps it’s time to reevaluate how we sell AR. Roman Hasenbeck, Director of Sales and Business Development at metaio Inc., the nation’s leading AR Tech firm, explains the process of selling AR the right way. He shows us why the Hype Curve is just a crutch for lazy producers, and how the most crucial yet often-ignored components to ensuring a great project and closing a sale is taking the time to learn the tech, design a thoughtful experience and communicate it effectively to the client.
Using a variety of original source material, Chris Grayson will give an overview of the global network, as envisioned by thinkers at ARPA before the creation of the ARPAnet. Examples include J.C.R. Licklider’s “Man-Computer Symbiosis,” 1960; Douglas Engelbart’s “Augmenting Human Intellect,” 1962; and Ivan Sutherland’s “The Ultimate Display,” 1965. Some focus will also be given to the people and personalities involved. Lisa Murphy will provide the technical explanation for many milestones in the evolution of the internet, making the case that the human interface to the network has historically been limited by the available technology, and with Augmented Reality, we are now entering an era that truly begins to deliver on the original vision.
Our life styles are increasingly evolving into hybrid experiences that blend the physical with the cyberspatial and the virtual. Moreover, these interactions are creating new forms of communities for fun and commerce, where consumers and businesses increasingly use hyperlocal incentives to leverage our immediate surroundings. In this panel, we’ll explore how games, collaborative consumption, Augmented Reality, consumer to consumer brokerages, experience augmentation, visual discovery and local commerce are providing the glue for diverse hyper-local experiences and communities.
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Outside voting counts for 30% of the selection process! Help us get to SXSW so we can bring these great panels to life.
My blog-mate Lester from Augmented Planet is the host for anybody interested in AR development and who couldn´t make it to the recent ARE in the US (watch out for next week´s wrap-up of this event). And he invites you with this:
<<<Augmented Reality (AR) is the latest red hot technology that is taking the world by storm. Have you ever wondered how you can use AR to build your own solutions that use the following technologies:
Natural feature tracking
Visual search
Face recognition
Augmented reality browsers
If you have wondered how you can use these technologies to build mobile applications for Android, iPhone, iPad 2, bada, Symbian or the web then Augmented Planet 2011 is the event for you. Augmented Planet, the No 1 blog dedicated to all things AR is back for our third London conference. This year we are focusing entirely on the development of AR applications and we have assembled the best speakers from the AR industry for an exclusive event in London.
At Augmented Planet 2011 you’ll hear from industry leaders, AR tools and platform providers and the UK’s leading AR developers. It’s not a death by PowerPoint event but an opportunity for you to see how easy it is to take advantage of AR.>>>
And indeed, one of the industry leaders tightly registered to this blog is taking part in this event: junaio´s Frank Angermann is showing you, how to develop über-cool junaio channels and generate buzz or business (or both) for your company or of course for expressing your creativity. Here´s a snapshot of MotiveNYC´s recent campaign, just for your inspiration (FYI):
While tablet computing may in future transform the whole computer industry, it is already changing the way we look at augmented reality. And this is not only because of the big display. More and more different devices for multiple OS platforms are expected to appear on the market, equipped with advanced sensors such as high-resolution cameras. The cost of data roaming is likely to drop and considering the millions of people expected to buy such a device in the next few years, there are incentives enough for optimizing augmented reality (AR) tablet software and to start creating really useful and fascinating applications taking full advantage of the promising, new capabilities. metaio, with its junaio 2.6 release, a junaio plug-in for third party app integration, and the revised mobile AR SDK Unifeye 2.5, is well prepared and ready to go for the next generation of AR applications. If you want to learn more about mobile AR in general and on tablets, everything is summed up here: http://www.metaio.com/specials/augmented-reality-on-tablets/
And here you can find a movie with almost everything we´re working on: 3D tracking, markerless 2D tracking and image processing, virtual manuals, interactive TV, smart packaging, advertising as a service, context sensitive product visualization, AR gaming and so on. By the way: to my knowledge it´s the first AR demos running on the Android 3.0 based Xoom!
Today my lovely colleague Noora (she has been portrayed here before) sent me a guest post. It´s a pleasure for me to present this interesting story about interactive TV scenarios and augmented reality right before the weekend. Enjoy zapping, AR browsing and of course this post:
>>>Last week I visited Cannes being brought to life for MIPTV. For the ones who don’t know the festival; MIP is the entertainment content market, where the newest programmes, freshest formats and latest innovations for TV, Internet and mobile are being showcased.
Besides the traditional buying and selling, this year a new concept was introduced; the Experience Hub. The organization set this up to showcase latest connected entertainment demos. It included great experiences by companies as Emotiv (using sensors from the wireless neuroheadset to connect to PCs for game controlling), PrimeSense (known for the Kinect sensor), etc.
metaio also had a booth within the Experience Hub, where we showcased the Augmented TV concept Galileo (ProSieben) aired in January and throughout the month of March. The feedback was amazing! One of the main topics of the festival was how to engage viewers while watching TV using their 3rd arms (known as smart phones). Therefore we are even more happy to announce that Galileo is showcasing another form of AR for their show Schlaflos (sleepless). For more on the new AR experience, please find an entry on the junaio blog.
I unfortunately had to miss the celebrities as e.g. the Governator presenting his comeback cartoon series. But the festival was truly inspiring and showed that Augmented Reality is well understood by the production and distribution companies and can really become a new way of interaction with TVs. This was also proven by two of the six Content 360 Awards winners who were presenting AR; one of them being Futurecode from Finland for their absolutely lovely Dibidogs AR books.
On our way to an augmented world there are still some hurdles to be taken. Data generation, bandwidth, standards and such. But we are not to far away anymore, let me tell you this. And it´s not only us doing the homework. While we are working for example on markerless tracking algorithms, others work on processing power and smart architecture. And there is another important stakeholder: output devices! For some scenarios – industrial as well as commercial – you`ll need both of your hands – and that´s where AR-able head mounted displays (a layman like me would call it magic glasses) step into the arena. You know what, today is a goood day for AR game developers, industrial AR researchers or experience designers! Vuzix Corporation today announced that it has formed a marketing and development partnership with metaio, the leader in the field of professional Augmented Reality (AR) software systems, to deliver head mounted display (HMD) solutions for their customers. The two companies will work together to identify and deliver customer solutions that require both metaio’s AR software capability and Vuzix’s line of ARenabled Video Eyewear. Paul Travers, President of Vuzix, commented, “Both metaio and Vuzix are leaders in and at the forefront of AR markets with highly complementary offerings. With Vuzix providing its award winning Video Eyewear products and engineering services and metaio providing its leading software platforms and software engineering capability, we believe that together we can better address this rapidly emerging market need.” metaio and Vuzix have identified a number of common customers that require integrated hands-free HMD solutions for applications such as marketing and advertising, assembly, maintenance, on-site and on the factory floor problem solving, training and education and entertainment.
Because images say more than a thousand words out of the official press release, here´s one of the many examples for markerless, handsfree augmented reality. By the way, this is registered in 3D and most of all: a real use case.
Posted by Trak 
