Do Good Research And Talk About It

As we are part of the research project AVILUS, which is funded by the german federal government, with the goal to develop, evaluate and implement virtual and augmented reality techniques to various industries, we were also part of the new media project by the federal ministry for education and research. The goal is to make the reserach in germany more visible. Said and done, here is the (german only) video. Please take special notice of the 3D tracking part starting at timecode 2.30!

http://www.ideen-zuenden.de/de/857.php

metaio Is Fair

Just wanted to share the latest coverage from our technology fair this year. Of course it is not like ISMAR, but we had 180 guests from around 25 countries, 30 live-demos and a lot of interesting new ideas and projects coming up. Maybe see you netx year …

REPORTAR

We only need one man like Ori to cover all the latest and best in augmented reality at the ISMAR. Finger stretched, fully trained, no need for sleep and on fire he will bring you the complete package. Check out the (un-) official blog for the AR event of the year.

If you still do not know, what is happening there, here a little sneak preview.

And Hey, of course i did not want to go to Orlando while winter is arriving in Munich. Couldn´t wait to see my old fella… Grrrrr!

By the way: I am working on junaio (see picture) – which has been presented already at one ISMAR workshop: www.socialaugmentedreality.org

Hand From Above

Big respect to Chris O`Shea and his work for FACT: Foundation for Art & Creative Technology and Liverpool City Council for BBC Big Screen Liverpool and the Live Sites Network. To see why the kids on the picture above have so much fun, got to this website or watch the video, which refused to get embedded, here.

Chris answered my questions about the project as following: ” The software I wrote myself in c++ using the openFrameworks & openCv libraries. The BBC Big Screen is fitted with a CCTV camera, linked into a computer that runs the software then outputs to the screen. The software picks a person based on their proportions & how alone they are from other people, then tracks the blob over time using optical flow.  If the giant hand removes, flicks or shrinks a person, firstly it rubs out the person from the live video using the background reference pixels.  Then the tracked person is redrawn over the top in relation to what the hand is doing, i.e. being picked up, or flying out to the left of the screen (not shown in this video).  When the hand shrinks a person it redraws them into the video at half scale.  When there is too big a crowd it resorts to tickling people, with a random selection.”

Here are two pictures showcasing the magic behind this adorable installation:

Augmented Reality Is An Award Winning Technology

It generated a lot of buzz in the media planning and advertising strategist / planners newswires, but this  thing has not been mentioned in the official “I love shockwave based augmented reality” blog, which you are reading at the moment. The campaign, which used the cover of Popular Science magazine as a stage for GE´s smart grid augmented reality advert, won the “Buzz Award” by the US american “Adweek” in the category Print. Here you can find the ADBUZZ  2009 winners and here you still can check out the most stable, robust and strategically interesting augmented reality print2web campaign of this year.

And because I like to do things very consequent, here´s the rest of the self-adulation programm for today: metaio has also won a “caught their eye” trophy at this year´s IBC and has won the Mobile Startups LaunchPad by GigaOm. I did not know, that we are a still a start-up, but I can use a quote of my mom here: you are always as old as you feel

Come And See The Berg – For Real

In case you haven´t heard of The Berg, it is an utopia developed by the creatives at Mila Berlin. When it was time to think about new spatial concepts for the former airport “Tempelhof” in the heart of Berlin they had a great idea. The Manifesto goes a little like this: “While big and wealthy cities in many parts of the world challenge the limits of possibility by building gigantic hotels with fancy shapes, erecting  sky-high office towers or constructing hovering philharmonic temples, Berlin sets up a decent mountain. Its peak exceeds 1000 metres and is covered with snow from September to March…” After officially contributing it to the contest people all over the world could testimony, how an idea of a place transforms the place itself. People created fictive postcards with The Berg, integrated it into the advertising campaign of Berlin and created many other visions of how the city would actually look like with having The Berg. So after all, The Berg at the beginning was fiction, something virtual, somehow becoming reality. And that´s where we came in, because that´s actually what augmented reality is all about! Now, by holding a map of Berlin in front of your webcam you can see The Berg grow and take it in your hands. It is there. On your table, and maybe within the playmobil figures you are using to create a little movie with real and virtual elements. So, as a starter, here´s a little movie of The Berg in someones hands. Would you like to video-answer? What comes to your mind?

And just in case you are reading this, while you are breathing the Berliner Luft, hey, go to The Berg Fest at fabulous St. Oberholz today. Here´s the flyer:

Ich Glotz TV

You only understand the word “TV” in the headline, that´s enough. I´ve seen the applications by our partner DNP, did not understand the voice over, but hey, that´s enough. To say “I like”:

http://blog.brosta.tv/tvprogram/2009/09/20090904663.html

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.

All About Augmented Reality

I´ve just finished a book review about the recently released “All about Augmented Reality”. As it is fully and only in japanese language the review of the pictures was done pretty fast. But for all my japanese readers and fans of AR and typography I can recommend one of the first trivial books about this revolutionary topic. The best way to find it in the net or your local shibuya bookstore might be the ISBN numer – hey, at least I was able to read this: ISBN978-4-8222-1083-0

As far as I understood it the book gives a good wrap-up and components overview about the state of the art in augmented reality. I bet, there are some books to follow in one of the languages I am able to read and write. I will keep you updated.