Augmented Reality Track Record

Ball Packaging Europe and the junaio team are doing great stuff these days. On the one site Matthias, the product manager of junaio, is experimenting with various tracking approaches in order to track a can. This is not as trivial as it sounds. Obviously a can is not flat and besides that the material has some reflections and the trackable pattern is not too big. Nevertheless, the  first results make me confident, that we will have a promotion or  game or whatever comes to the mind of the creative Plattform “Dosionair” (Dose is  German and means: can). Please find the first try out here:

http://youtu.be/wFRijTIulog

As mentioned, this is only the beginning. A print campaign running right now, integrates the current advertising clip into the ad. You can find more about this here on the other site: http://www.dosionair.de/augmented/ Also there´s a growing canbase (sorry for this one…) on facebook, discussing about packaging ideas of the future and getting connected to the brand and values. Summing it up: Ball is really into AR and I am looking forward to the results, when a can for one of these huge soft drink brands will become one of the first “things” in an internet of things  as an augmented object…

Get Your Own Mobile Augmented Reality Experience

This is a world premiere! Because for the first time it is possible to directly experience image recognition and tracking on an iPhone live from an article in a blog or magazine. By embedding the image below and by pointing the phone onto it you will see a 3D animation coming out of your desktop!

Please find a “How to” – Video: here.

Here´s what you and/or your readers have to do:

1. Download free version of junaio for iPhone (works for Android too if you want to get crazy and try it).

2. Make sure your iPhone is running iOS 4.0.

3. “Tune in” to junaio glue demo channel. To do this you press the “Channels” button in the upper right corner, then press the “Featured” channel set, and then finally press the junaio glue demo item. If you can’t find the junaio glue demo channel for some reason, you can always search for it by clicking the text field at the top that says “subscribed channels.”

4. After opening the channel, just pass your iPhone viewfinder over the picture of the superhero below and you will see a 3D version of him on your iPhone’s screen. If you tap the screen, he does an action pose.

Credits: 3D model by Philipp Kratzer

Augmented Reality Check

I completely agree with the statements made by Blair MacIntyre in this article. No miracle, he is one of THE experts for augmented reality from the beginning. And, also opposite to me, a developer. He really knows what he is talking about, when he states that object recognition, accessibility or processor power are bigger issues, than they appear from a hype point of view. It reminds me of a lunch talk with one of our mobile AR developers, where he drawed my attention to the problem of the very thin lines of a barcode and the interlacing in a live-video. The real world reference is an established standard, OK, but he doesn´t want to be the one to deliver a robust tracking within a mobile (low resolution camera!) consumer application (very robust, very safe, very “I push the button and it works”) within the next year. So, a video like this for example will perhaps win the “AR Mock-up Fake and Post Production Award” (ARMFPPA) – established right at this moment, so no problem in case you don´t know – but it has got nothing to do with reality. Not even in an augmented sense. The problem is: they get press, they get blog entries and they are creating a hype wave, whereas the really cool developments and small but safe steps get owerflown. I hope that we can nevertheless create islands where the good demos can live a happy life and grow up until they lead to bigger and better applications. There we´ll wait until the deluge is over.

If you see this sign (Razzie Awards Icon Halle Berry) on a demo, beware! It could be on the shortlist for the ARMFPP-Awards…