Registration is open for the Augmented World Expo, June 4-5 (formerly ARE). Use code AWE3META to get a special discount, courtesy of Metaio [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: Oblivion
You’ve probably already seen the trailer, but we’re just tickled to see yet another Tom Cruise movie that features egregious exposure of CGI Augmented Reality.
Two days; 500 attendees; 20 speaking sessions; standing-room-only workshops; brand-new products; exciting demos. If you missed this year’s insideAR Augmented Reality conference, fret not- we’ve got all the updates, announcements and media coming directly to you. Stay tuned for the long form, but in the meantime check out this list of everything you need to catch up.
insideAR 2012 in Links
Metaio launches new Developer Hub, all-in-one resource for product documentation, support, updates, tutorials- everything [portal]
insideAR teaser trailer- the best of the best [video]
Thanks to our Media Partner Ubergizmo for the great write-up: insideAR Augmented Reality Conference, Oct 1-2, Munich [article]
insideAR 2012 speaker Christine Perey wrote a wonderful post about her experience at the event [post] And here’s her fascinating presentation, “Open and Interoperable AR” [video]
We promised the latest in wearable computing; our partner Vuzix was happy to oblige [press release]
Sneak peak: Metaio Presents the newly redesigned Creator 2.0, the only tool that lets you create AR experiences in less than 5 minutes without a single line of code [video] (courtesy of Javier Campos of eDiamSistemas) (update: video actually taken by Rainer Lonau of Augmented Minds, but Javier tweeted it!)
We proudly present a brand-new release of metaio’s most powerful Augmented Reality tool. After integrating additional modules for calibration and alignment, metaio Engineer provides every function for adjusting AR analyses. This applies especially to set-actual comparisons in product development, based on tracking with a measuring arm.
Here are the most sophisticated new features of metaio Engineer 5.0:
Integrated high precision camera calibration
Instead of the Sextant Calibration with a chessboard pattern, now you can chose the Extended Sextant Calibration based on a 3D AICON panel.
Efficient high precision off-set calibration
The offset between a camera and an external tracking sensor – like a measuring arm – now can be determined based on a 3D AICON pattern.
Alignment without external help
For finding out where an external tracking sensor is located in relation to the real object that has to be analyzed, no more external measurement tool is necessary.
Joining the extensive list of visionary speakers and presenters at insideAR 2012 will be Maria Ekberg Brännström, Global Catalogue Manager for IKEA. Also presenting will be Olav Gjerlufsen from LEGO. Don’t miss the opportunity to hear industry exerts from various fields explain how Augmented Reality has worked for them! Come explore the impossible at insideAR 2012, October 1-2 in Munich Germany.
Curious to know whom the speakers and presenters will be at this year’s insideAR? Well your wait is over as we are announcing the following leaders and visionaries in the field of Augmented Reality who will be joining us to present various topics related to their expertise and interest in Augmented Reality.
Olav Gjerlufsen: Director Digital Producers at LEGO
What is included with an insideAR Conference Pass…
2 full days of access to the insideAR Augmented Reality Conference
Food and Drinks while the conference is in session
Free access to various workshops and sessions
Discounts and Special Offers
*Special pricing on tickets for students
*Free entrance for the press and metaio Partners.
15% Bring a Friend Discount – After purchasing a ticket, you will receive a special code which you can give to friends and colleagues which will give them 15% off of their ticket purchase.
Each year metaio unveils the latest advances in the exciting field of Augmented Reality (AR). Business and technology professionals come from all over the world to see the newest industrial installations, the latest mobile app developments, wearable computing prototypes, and futuristic projects straight from the R&D labs of metaio and its international network of partners. Come explore the impossible at insideAR 2012, October 1-2 in Munich Germany.
“The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.” - Arthur C. Clarke
Curious to know whom the speakers and presenters will be at this year’s insideAR? Well your wait is over as we are announcing the following leaders and visionaries in the field of Augmented Reality who will be joining us to present various topics related to their expertise and interest in Augmented Reality.
Olav Gjerlufsen: Director Digital Producers at LEGO
…and many more!
Interested in lending your voice? Contact us at insidear@metaio.com
See the latest technology in the AR Live Expo
Join us in the insideAR Exhibition hall for Augmented Reality experiences from metaio, our partners and certified developers. Learn more about the development tools and meet our Certified Developers in the Developer Lounge.
Try out the latest examples and applications using the metaio Mobile SDK and junaio. See best-practice use-cases from various industries, such as retail, print, digital marketing and automotive, implementing AR solutions. Last, but definitely not least, learn what the future holds for the vision of an Augmented City, both indoors and out!
Interested in showcasing your technology? Contact us at insidear@metaio.com
Take part in our Free Workshops and Learn from the Best
For the first time ever at insideAR, metaio will be hosting interactive workshops on specific technical and business use cases for Augmented Reality technology. Come learn best practices from the most professional and advanced AR team in the world.
For App Developers: Getting started creating your Mobile Augmented Reality apps based upon metaio AR technology solutions
For junaio Developers: junaio AR experiences integrating AREL (Augmented Reality Experience Language)
For Everyone: Everything you want to know about tracking real-world objects in AR and where does the future take us.
For Publishers: Simplified Augmented Reality for publishing using the metaio Creator
For Marketers: How to market and sell your products and services using the power of Augmented Reality
What is included with an insideAR Conference Pass…
2 full days of access to the insideAR Augmented Reality Conference
Food and Drinks while the conference is in session
Free access to various workshops and sessions
Discounts and Special Offers
*Special pricing on tickets for students
*Free entrance for the press and metaio Partners.
15% Bring a Friend Discount – After purchasing a ticket, you will receive a special code which you can give to friends and colleagues which will give them 15% off of their ticket purchase.
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!
We are very happy to invite you to this year’s insideAR, and to announce the first details about what will be an exciting and illuminating event for the Augmented Reality industry. We would love to have you join us in beautiful Munich for the most professional business-minded event in Augmented Reality and mobile high-tech. The metaio team
In the last 12 months the outlook for Augmented Reality as a mass technology has changed dramatically.
In August of 2011 metaio CTO Peter Meier introduced the first-ever optical recognition and tracking of a real world object on a consumer mobile device, as well as a dedicated technological and professional roadmap to make accessing digital information in the real world a more natural experience.
metaio later integrated 3-D object tracking into the free version of the metaio Mobile Software Development Kit (SDK) and released it to the mobile developer community to enable and empower the next generation of mobile AR apps.
This year you will witness the next steps that will change the Augmented City from an idealized model into the real digital environment around you. metaio will show how a city, like Munich, can become truly augmented bringing digital information around you in an intuitive and natural interface. The real Augmented City will be created using more powerful but easier-to-use tools like junaio, or drag and drop AR creation tools such as the metaio Creator, which enables everyone to create Augmented Reality experiences with little or no technical knowledge.
Enter the future of the Augmented City at insideAR 2012 and learn how the digital world becomes natural experience.
metaio will give an exclusive first look at upcoming products, as well as insight into the latest advancements in the popular metaio Mobile SDK. Since its inception, insideAR has had the reputation for unveiling and announcing new technology and advances that have always been the cutting edge of vision based interactions. insideAR has always been the event to attend to see state-of-the-art Augmented Reality technology applied in real-world environments and situations.
As the technology leading AR company, metaio will present the results of European research projects VENTURI, EFA 2014 and CRUMBS, which show future scenarios of integrated Augmented Reality use.
metaio and its certified partners deliver hundreds of AR applications every year. Each use-case provides a specific solution for a specific problem. The exhibition at insideAR 2012 will give attendees a hands-on learning experience for integrated AR applications. The companies behind these projects will assist you on the implementation of potential AR projects into your business.
Take the opportunity to present your business and your recent innovations at insideAR, one of the most important Augmented Reality conferences worldwide. Meet the pioneers and leaders in the field of Augmented Reality. The high-level interaction and the direct contact with visiting professionals give you the opportunity to experience and discuss solutions in practical environments. From potential customers to experienced service providers and technology specialists, insideAR is the only event that brings together all aspects of the Augmented Reality industry.
Present your products and services to top decision-makers and opinion leaders increasing the visibility of your company within the international Augmented Reality community. Learn more about the options to present your business by contacting us atinsideAR [at] metaio [dot] com.
As every year, the leaders and visionaries of the AR industry will be on stage to present current achievements in technology, business, implementation and integration of Augmented Reality.
Past years speakers and presenters have included luminaries from world-renowned hardware companies like Nokia, ST-Ericsson, NVIDIA, ARM, Sony, as well as representatives from industry-proven agencies like Porter Novelli and Resource Interactive.
We are still searching and evaluating lists of potential speakers and keynotes to ensure we have a quality, curated list for all of our attendees. If you’d like to nominate a speaker or submit a speaking proposal, please contact us atinsideAR [at] metaio [dot] com.
Sorry for the lack of insideAR updates recently- we have been quite occupied with the free release of our metaio Mobile SDK. Rest assured, updates will continue as originally promised. Oh, and look! It’s snowing.
For those of you who weren’t able to attend insideAR 2011:
Not only did you miss a fantastic talk by Transitional Media Founder John C. Havens- you also lost the chance to see this guy rock out on blues harmonica. No really- that’s how John started off his presentation entitled, “Virtual Air Rights: How Augmented Reality Will Transform Advertising and Identity”.
Mr. Havens recently wrote an article for Mashable dealing with the same issue- his presentation at insideAR took the long form of expanding upon many of his ideas and theories regarding the role Augmented Reality will play in the future with regard to social media and targeted advertising.
For Mr. Havens, the question of virtual air rights is one that has yet to be answered or defined, but can be seen as an opportunity for the AR community when posited as a question of identity, especially that of the individual user.
According to Havens, when you take into account the emerging technology such as image recognition like Google goggles, social facial recognition platforms like Viewdle, gesture and eye tracking interfaces like the Microsoft Kinect, and general GPS and location-based services, the implications are pretty shocking when paired with social media data.
The future is not far from the following: “I walk into Starbucks and using my Google wallet I [pay], using Google Latitude I automatically check in [to the physical location]… I walk near the counter, as NFC improves, and you already know my preferences because of [shared social media data] and the idea is that you already know what my coffee is.”
Havens imagines a future where social technology turns the consumers into the marketing and leveraging tool rather than advertisements and paid media.
Brands could reward consumers for brand advocacy and loyalty every time that person shares or recommends something socially that could influence a purchasing decision.
Where AR comes in is the ability to access and display this information. Facial recognition technology could easily be used to pull up this kind of data, especially in a future where AR glasses or contact lenses exist.
Havens imagines a system of “Accountability Based Influence”- social metrics and purchasing data that contributes to an overall drive of marketing and reward systems:
“To me this is inevitable- you’re watching your show, American Idol or something. The next day you walk to work and you get a text: “Hey you watched American Idol last night and Coke is a sponsor, do you want a free Coke for being a loyal fan? And then you walk into a store, someone hands you the Coke.” And of course, any other purchases would be made using Facebook Credits, which Havens believes may be one of the largest banks in the world in just a few short years.
Mr. Haven is a regular contributor to Mashable, and you can find him on Twitter at @johnchavens where he tweets about Social Media, Augmented Reality, and new technology that will almost assuredly control our every actions without us ever knowing it. We were very happy he joined us at insideAR and hope to see him again in the future.
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.
Posted by Trak 
