Ever since we released the no-charge version of the metaio Mobile SDK in December, we’ve been searching for tech-savvy and creatively driven individuals and organizations that would get as excited as we do about vision-based mobile technology. Turns out no one actually gets as excited about computer-vision as we do, but there are certainly those who come close. Enter Harmony, a UK-based marketing agency who we are proud to announce is our first mobile software Certified Developer.
Founded in 1995, Harmony is an agency known for in-house design and development and expert web and app integration of marketing campaigns for a wide range of clients:
Harmony are a well-established creative agency based north of London, UK and develop clever web based solutions for a wide range of national and international clients. We have a diverse set of in-house skills from 3D and concept design work to database and Java programming which allow us to innovate and produce effective, novel and inspiring campaigns. The agency core has always been based on strong marketing principles and the blending of commercial requirements with technological developments.
Harmony has since put their development skills to the test (and to the proof) in using metaio’s mobile software to develop Onvert, a free mobile application for iOS and Android that combines the speed of QR code reading with the visual awe of Augmented Reality experiences.
2 years ago, we experimented with Augmented Reality concepts as part of our exploration of technologies but it was only when we looked at the combination of AR, QR Codes and parallax 3D that we came up with the model of Onvert. As designers ourselves, we wanted to make AR as accessible, powerful and inspiring as possible so that it is an extension of creativity rather than a boundary. Onvert is a combination of a custom web portal and a freely distributed app and allows designers to overlay virtual content (with or without sound) on any trigger image of choice. The QR codes can be read by any standard QR reader and, conversely, the Onvert viewer can interpret standard QR codes to guide users to the clients website. The Onvert app, however, can project the designers 3D content.
We assessed several options to achieve the high level of functionality required of the system but it became obvious that the Metaio Mobile SDK was the only real solution for us. With the assistance of the excellent technical department we were able to co-ordinate the development of the app to fit the new release in January 2012 to some amazingly positive feedback. We are now working on the next full release which will include enhanced content and increased object recognition making the most of the latest metaio Mobile SDK to expand the user experience even further.
We’re thrilled that Harmony has taken our SDK out for a spin and come back with such a great app. This is a great example of how developers, organizations, and even existing enterprises can utilize the stellartools metaio has provided to create entire business models. Check out the links above and learn more about how Harmony has taken some of the most advanced computer-vision software and built a great application on top of it.
Are you interested in developing the next-generation of mobile Augmented Reality applications? Contact us and try out for our Certified Developer program- and who knows….maybe you’re next!
Following Dr. Alt’s Welcome Address, CTO Peter Meier took the stage to talk about progress, growth, and most importantly, the process of making the experience of accessing digital information more intuitive and convenient.
In his address, “Making the Digital a Natural Experience”, Meier stressed the importance that all digital experiences need to be natural, intuitive, and fun- an interaction that bridges the gap between virtual and physical. Meier added that though there are many that talk about accomplishing this, metaio is making measurable steps to make this a reality.
“It’s important to have a dream- it’s also important to make it come true,” noted Meier.
junaio is one of metaio’s most visible benchmarks- the world’s most advanced AR browser saw tremendous growth in the last year in available content, developers, and channels in development (per developer) of at least 300%. More channels active per developer means more content, and both Meier and metaio believe that great content combined with great technology is the key to utility. Overall usefulness is imperative for AR to become the next mass medium.
Meier detailed some of the advancements we’ve made in the past year:
junaio has incorporated visual search, giving any user instant access to junaio AR content
the German Green Party used metaio technology to develop a political mobile with large potential for change
Meier announced what will eventually be the metaio Creator, a point and click interface for easily and quickly creating AR content for our software. The Creator will start with junaio and eventually be rolled out to all of metaio’s advanced software solutions.
Meier went on to demonstrate cutting-edge research that would eventually be presented at ISMAR in October- inarguable evidence that metaio is looking toward the future. We may be a product company, but no small part of our efforts are devoted to continually research and developing new technologies and interfaces. And as Meier explained, emerging technologies clearly favor AR. NFC, HTML5, and high powered telecom networks all point to enabling richer, smoother AR experiences.
Our CTO closed his presentation with a brief comparison between AR and the gaming industry, which had a gradual climb before ascending to a $65 Billion industry. Some of the gaming industry’s largest advancements came in the form of outside hardware and chipset manufacturers like NVIDIA. metaio has embarked on similar initiatives by entering into collaborative R&D partnerships with mobile chipset and hardware providers.
As Meier said at the close of his presentation, “Let’s go make this a $65 billion industry!” With the right content and hardware providers working with metaio’s technology, anything is possible.
Stay tuned for our next post- a recap of John C Haven’s insideAR keynote, “Virtual Advertising Rights”.
Hopefully by now you’ve all seen the teaser video and read about the very, very cool announcements we made at insideAR this year. I honestly wish that I could adequately describe insideAR. Maybe it’s because I helped assemble and move 15-20 very heavy table. Maybe watching these camera arrays and industrial prototyping demos come to life, piece by piece gives one more of an appreciation in seeing the finished product. Maybe it was just my first time in Germany, combined with the anticipation of Oktoberfest in Bavaria, combined with the excitement of meeting all of the people with whom I’ve only ever communicated via Skype or telephone or email. Luckily, we don’t have to rely on my floundering attempts at description- we have videos!
This is the first clip of many that we plan to roll out over the coming days and weeks, demonstrating the current and future technologies under the hood (sometimes literally) of metaio.
insideAR was divided into various exhibition segments- one of these was called “Augmented Living”, where we demonstrated some of the potential uses of AR in the household, including the new junaio 3.0 SCAN release that allows the user to get pricing and ingredient information from grocery item barcodes. In that same area, we were also showing our Bosch 3D studio app for iPad that allows people to practically redesign their kitchens with new appliances- without ever leaving their homes.
Many attendees played around with the Around Me Geo Trivia junaio game is a very creative example of how gaming, education and mobile AR can work together to shape an engaging user experience. Sensor fusion takes elements that we tend to take for granted — orientation, geographical relative position, radial distance — and translates them into usable information- in this case, a very fun trivia game.
Our company was built on out-of-the-box industrial solutions, so it should be no surprise to see those prototyping examples in the above video. The sub-millimeter tracking with a guided camera-arm would allow any manufacturer the highest digital scrutiny in examining a prototype on the factory floor; and with the “window-to-the-world”-type 3D mapping you can overlay the original wireframe to the real-word object itself, regardless of its size. With this kind of technology, metaio is naturally bridging the industrial gap between the digital creation and the physical construction of a given product.
Really cool stuff we’re talking about here. Really cool.
Once again, we’re going to be rolling out all sorts of video in the near future, so be sure to either subscribe to this blog or to our YouTube channel (or both!) in order to stay posted.
If you haven’t heard from TechCrunch, Dexigner, or Augmented.org, this year’s insideAR brought some very significant developments for metaio. To sum it up, we made three important announcements to over 450(!) attendees:
The release a free version of the Mobile SDK, soon to be integrated with a game engine
The release of an AR-publishing tool, junaio Creator, to enable virtually anybody to create AR content for junaio
Strategic partnerships with the leading chipset IP supplier ARM and mobile platform developer ST-Ericsson on joint R&D
What this means for the industry
Mobile SDK is now free
This is a big deal. AR is a young industry- we want to see it into adulthood. We want developers, researchers, students, newcomers etc to be able to test the limits of their imaginations and creativity with one of the most comprehensive and advanced mobile AR solutions out there. I can’t wait to watch these independent developers shape the future of AR applications in their endeavors.
The junaio Creator
User interface and workflow are two of the most important things that any software provider must consider- we want both of these aspects to be more streamlined, more convenient, more natural- and that’s why we announced the junaio Creator. It’s tool that takes all of the image recognition, the natural feature tracking, and the complex algorithms of junaio and reduces that magic to two simple words: point and click. Whether you’re creating a junaio channel or utilizing our junaio Plugin to add a feature to an existing app, the junaio Creator allows you to do this without a single line of code. Check out the demo in the TechCrunch article and see for yourself.
Formal Collaborations with ARM & ST-Ericsson
I’ve been saying this for years: the surest way to enable the smoothest most immersive AR experiences is to ensure the optimization of the hardware. Though we’ve already been optimizing our software for these wonderful mobile devices that pepper our lives, metaio can now work directly with these processing and chipset providers to find the best way to ensure that mobile devices are AR-ready before they hit the shelves.
In closing
We have a genuine passion for what we do. It may seem as though we ‘re making bold statements, but please understand that it comes from a shared excitement, an almost child-like fascination in its innocence at seeing dreams becoming reality, not just 3D and digital content (though we do that too).
Augmented Reality on Every Smartphone by 2014- It will be magic.
Augmented Reality as a technology is often seen through utilitarian eyes. AR has many appropriate industry uses, such as improving mechanical safety inspections, interactive training procedures, mobile instruction manuals, and assembly-line safety. But over the past few months, we’ve seen developers use our technology more and more for personal, emotional, most importantly artistic expression.
XYZ Site Gallery AR experience
It’s difficult to try to comprehend the almost limitless design possibilities when you have the potential to take any digitally-designed or rendered object and place, overlay, or otherwise anchor it to the physical world. Imagine: a vast museum of virtual artifacts and objects occupying the same space as the Louvre- accessible only through your mobile device! The term “mixed media” is barely sufficient anymore- we’re beginning to see a real blending of the virtual and the physical, with a substantial emphasis on using metaio’s software, like junaio, to curate and design galleries, exhibits, art and space augmentations, and even use “basic” functionalities of junaio to guide and navigate around them.
Chris Hodson and Sarah Staton recently designed an experience for the Sheffield, UK Site Gallery in which they designed and implemented sculptures that were part virtual and part material, including marble, concrete, metal, wood, glass, wool and cork. The experience was triggered by a series of markers placed around and inside the museum- such a simple installation process for something so complex! Hodson and Staton even worked with physicist Dominic Hosler to design a “cuboid game of life and death”, in which “infinitely accumulating and dissipating cubes” loop themselves into eternity.
Anyone living or vacationing in Italy this year should already be familiar with the 54thVenice Biennale Art Exhibition. This year, we’re pleased to announce there will be a junaio channel running the duration of the event until 27 November 2011. The channel, “Venice Augmented”, was developed by San Francisco-based Certified Developer Vitamin AR under the direction of artist Amir Baradaran, and places examples of Baradaran’s work in POI’s around Venice and the Biennale, as part of his “FutARism” campaign:
I am interested in how small acts of resistance, particularly within so-called virtual domains, can create pockets of transformation. Seeking to generate much more than novel surprise, my art explores new ways of being.
These are just two ways in which artists are using junaio to design wonderfully interactive experiences. Below is a list of links to recent examples of junaio augmenting the art world. What kind of projects could you envision, knowing that what you design is not bound by the laws of nature? A Borgesian map, perhaps?
Wink.
-Trak
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Scope, Cabinet Exhibition, Peninsula Arts Gallery, Plymouth, UK; Vladimir Geroimenko and Roberto Fraquelli
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.
Noub, no typing error. It´s just because our augmented reality browser junaio has “partnered with real estate search engines ROFO and HotPads—commercial and residential, respectively—to make finding the perfect space easy, sans wily brokers and landlords.” and the headline I found in an article just is the perfect short description. ROFO and HotPads are using augmented reality to visually show users all nearby properties in a several mile radius on their phone to take the hassle out of property search. All properties and listing information are overlaid on top of the user’s camera view to point them to availabilities nearby. Another great example of an easy access to location based information with a cool and handy user interface.
Headline and parts of the text stolen: here. More information here: www.junaio.com
Wow, after the first dust has settled it´s time for me to give you an update about junaio on augmentedblog. The version 2.0 features a whole new … er, I mean, you can read all this here. And there´s a fantastic scavenger hunt to be played in on and around the SXSW conference next week, which… well, you can see this in the movie below and read everything about “scavengAR” here or here. But the implications of all the new functions anyway are … Gosh (!) … this journalist at übergizmo was faster than me. So what can I add to this? You are right! junaio has an open API. It is open for concepts, designers, content partners, developers or ideas and experiences by users. And where else than in this tiny information source for aumented reality enthusiasts could we put the emphasize on the fact, that we are welcoming everybody on the platform and are looking forward to create an augmented world together. Get in touch, try the app (it´s for free), play around, get inspired and let us know, what you are thinking, planning or what you already have done through creating a fascinating channel!
Posted by Trak 
