Your Augmented Future: The 3 Hottest Videos From International AR Symposium

Cheers Read Write Web for these peaks at where AR is heading

Written by Marshall Kirkpatrick / October 26, 2009 12:09 PM / 4 Comments

3D virtual pets to hold in your hand and interact with, software that turns drawn objects into movable 3D objects subject to the laws of physics and a Microsoft hiring-coup. Those are the stories behind the hottest videos from the eye and brain-candy world of Augmented Reality, as seen at last week's International Symposium on Augmented and Extended Reality in Orlando, Florida.

Who says the web is all about pages that you view in a browser? Check out these three visions of a fast-approaching future where data is drawn from and overlaid on top of the real world around us.

Kid Stuff: Eye Pet

The Eye Pet is a virtual critter that you can interact with through a webcam on your computer. Check out this demo where the Sony Computer Entertainment Europe pets the animal and spins through a 3D menu of toys to play use in playing with it. It's pretty awesome. The Eye Pet is expected to be released for the PS3 game system as early as next month.

That looks like a lot of fun for kids (who knows about the psychological impact) but imagine other interactive 3D objects with menus of options like this. Occupational training possibilities? Sports practice? There seems to be a lot of possibilities.

Thanks to Canadian PhD student Gail Carmichael for shooting that video.

The New AR Paradigm: AR Sketch

We wrote about this international project last week and the team behind it went on to win the Best Student Paper award at the ISMAR conference.

AR Sketch takes drawn images, processes live video capture of the drawings and turns them into 3D image overlays. Then it subjects them to a physics simulation. The team behind it just happened to hack into the private API for live video processing on the iPhone and make it available to developers around the world, too.

Popular AR apps like Yelp or Layar on mobile phones don't actually know what they are looking at, they just know where you are and which direction you're facing. Thus they can tell you what they believe you're looking at. Marker-based AR apps know only to look for one thing - a printed marker with a pattern on it that triggers display of an overlay. Sketch AR needs neither guesses nor markers - it processes and augments what you're actually looking at.

It's nuts. As Ori Inbar wrote about the Sketch AR team in an overview of ISMAR, "Their work is revolutionizing the AR world by avoiding the need to print markers - or any images whatsoever."

Here Comes Microsoft AR!

Oxford's Georg Klein, whom Inbar calls "the smartest Computer Vision guy on the block," just joined Microsoft this month, conference-goers learned. Is Microsoft going to make a major Augmented Reality play? They'd be fools not to explore the possibility. They don't want to be left out in the cold if AR does become the next version of the web. Here's what their new man's been working on.

These exciting examples of Augmented Reality have little to do with mobile location awareness, a nice reminder that there's a whole lot more to the field. Mobile AR browsers are the best known commercial services so far, but academic research on other forms of AR has been going on for years.

Ready to browse and interact with data on top of the physical world, through webcams, mobile phones and increasingly svelte AR glasses? A future when such experiences are mainstream may be fast approaching.

App-vertising

Thanks mobile behaviour for this look at the rise of the app as an ad channel. Personally i think it's just the latest bandwagon for an approach that I support but has been long touted - less advertising and more delivering services that people find useful. Mobile and online apps provide handy ways to do this, but at the end of the day it’s common sense that being useful is better way to get people to favour you than yelling at them is.


As Attention Swings Towards Mobile, The Rise of "App-vertising"

Every week we see dozens of new applications released, with a few which manage to improve our lives in some shape or form. It's clear that developers are keen on creating the next big thing and user attention is obviously on the app store. Earlier this month USA Today even declared the existence of so-called app addiction, with possible health issues tied to excessive mobile app use. While the iPhone app store is still young, many marketers have noticed the number of eyeballs checking in during this shifting attention economy. Welcome to an age of "app-vertising."

Last week Volkswagen took a unique and cost-efficient approach to advertising its new GTI using just an iPhone app. Their reasoning included a comparison between a prime-time audience for a television show like NCIS (21 million), and reported iPhone and iPod touch customers worldwide (over 50 million). With a lower cost and an additional PR value, Volkswagen took the ladder, receiving both increased engagement and more for their money.

For musicians Alice in Chains, the app store was attractive in a slightly different fashion. To push their new album they are releasing an app, with videos, photos, news, and entire audio track-list included. If brands can advertise using apps, why not musicians? No matter what the product, marketers are being drawn to where the consumer user is, the app-store. This new destination is ripe with opportunity for those who are able to create a niche utility for enhancing our daily routine.

Using Flickr as a Paintbrush

Thanks Flowing Dat afor this cool project that brings a bit of (average hue) colour ot mapping

Posted by Nathan / Oct 28, 2009 to Mapping / Add your comment

Andy Woodruff from Cartogrammar uses average color in Flickr photos to map the colors that people take the most pictures of. The above for example, shows the common colors of Harvard Square. Why all the red? It's because there's so many brick buildings.

So in the end is a map that provides a different geographic view of what we're used to seeing. We're used to seeing the aerials or the designer-defined color coding of roads and land. This however, while portrayed as a view from above, is what people are seeing on the ground.

Awesome - advertising banners carried by flies

Flyvertising? Wonder what the average CTR is?

‘Virtual Street Corners’ Connects Socially Isolated Neighborhoods

Cheers psfk once again... awesome project

October 22, 2009

Roxbury and Brookline are connected by the Route 66 bus line and separated by only 2.4 miles, but socially they are worlds apart. Roxbury is a poor, urban neighborhood in Boston proper and Brookline is a wealthy, suburban neighborhood just outside the city. As of today, the communities rarely interact. Thanks to an interesting project named Virtual Street Corners that is all about to change.

Scheduled to debut May 15th 2010, Virtual Street Corners takes a large storefront window located in front of a bus stop in each neighborhood and transforms it into a video screen. These video screens, which will stream a real-time feed 24/7, will literally provide a window into the other community in an effort to encourage the residents to interact. The screens will also serve as media centers for news collection and reporting, creating a ‘virtual town hall.”

In order to facilitate personal interaction and news reporting, Virtual Street Corners has organized three citizens from different areas of each town to report daily news on a scheduled basis. In addition, there will be a website that streams both live feeds and hosts podcasts/videocasts for download.

Virtual Street Corners

[via Kenji Summers]

Shoe-Shopping via Short Code

Thanks Next Great Thing for this post on short code shopping

Despite th obvious issues the author pioint sout, i think it's an intersting way to run ecommerce in a low-fi way

October 5, 2009 by NGT

Shoe-Shopping via Short Code

Not counting content for the mobile phone, like ringtones, mobile commerce is still in its infancy in the United States. From fast food (Papa John’s) to fashion (Net-a-Porter), marketing and sales executives with pioneering attitudes have been experimenting with mobile commerce. Many are still trying to figure out what does and does not work in connecting with consumers and their wallets via their mobile phones.

Since most US mobile users still do not have a smart phone, companies have to decide whether to offer a richer experience via an optimized mobile Web site or app, but to potentially fewer customers, or reach more customers via something almost every mobile user has, such as SMS. While at first blush it might seem best to err on the side of scale, my recent experience with an SMS-based m-commerce platform convinced me otherwise.

Here's how it went down. A few weeks ago while on vacation, I was flipping through a women’s magazine and came across an ad which contained a potentially cute pair of shoes. As there was a mobile call to action and I was nowhere near my laptop, I was intrigued. I texted the code to the short code and the process began.

However, several messages back and forth later, I did not buy the shoes. Never having shopped for anything this way or from this service or retailer before, I was not sure what to expect. Other than “standard messaging rates apply,” neither the ad nor the first message from ShopText (on behalf of the retailer) offered any expectations. The process itself was a long series of messages, which seemed to take longer than if I had just gone to my nearest Internet connection, logged on and created an account. Frustrated, I aborted somewhere along the way (again, not sure how far along as nothing was communicated regarding what to expect).

My issue was not just with the cumbersome and unclear nature of the shopping process itself. Unfortunately, shopping by text message did not meet the high bar for shopping for shoes virtually that sites like Endless and Zappos have set. The print ad offered almost no detail in the photo and accompanying text and none of the text messages offered any additional details (thus, why I earlier referred to the shoes as “potentially cute”). I had no idea what the heel height and type were, what type of pattern had been laser cut into the leather, if there was a platform in the shoe, etc. These are all extremely important details to me, as I expect they are to most women, when evaluating a shoe.

Even though I found my particular experience lacking, I have to applaud this retailer and magazine for trying to increase the engagement with their young, connected, female consumers via the ShopText platform. They recognize that there is a real opportunity in connecting with consumers via their mobile phones, an item that most consumers state they cannot and do not live without (per Synovate’s recent research that found “three quarters of the survey respondents - including 82% of Americans - never leave home without their phones, and 36% of people across the world (42% of Americans) go as far as to say they 'cannot live without' their cell phone”).

However, for m-commerce to outgrow its baby shoes, all of the parties involved need to rethink how women are accustomed and want to shop for shoes virtually. Otherwise, for this category of goods, ShopText will need to clarify the level of service offered by renaming itself “OrderText.”

- Valerie Cashour

The Next App Store: Inside Cars

Thanks Psfk for this on where app stores might be heading

October 23, 2009

It is clear that the mobile web is a big deal. Which got us to thinking — what’s the next device for the internet to build and ecosystem around ? Well, BMW thinks it’s cars and they are in the process of developing a BMW Application Store (think iPhone Apps for your Car).

The store, which is still in the conceptual stages, offers apps that users can download on-the-move to the iDrive in their BMW or via Computer (apps are then transfered to the car system). Apps currently under development include: travel guides, geowikis, games, podcasts, Facebook, Xing, and Twitter. One of the unique features of mobile apps that will also apply to BMW apps is it draws on your location to deliver useful and timely information. For example, applications for social networks (Facebook or Twitter) can read your car’s navigation system to guide your car thru traffic or recommend a great restaurant en route to your destination. In addition, it is a vitual certainty that car related data — braking patterns or acceleration history — will be used to develop apps that help you stay safe or save gas.

Potential Application: Michelin Guide 2.0

Thinking about how brands can use technology to develop compelling experiences (not just products) to stay relevant, it occurs to us that Michelin Tires is the perfect company to develop an application for the BMW App Store. In a very early example of branded info-tainment, Michelin Guides were started to started to sell Michelin tires by providing “chauffeurs with practical information about where they could service/repair cars and find accommodations or meals.”

They later evolved to include the now famous star system:

• One Star (”a very good restaurant in its category”)
• Two Stars (”excellent cooking, worth a detour”),
• Three Stars (”exceptional cuisine, worth a special journey”)

Michelin will hopefully build an app around the story of its authentic automotive roots which will alert drivers (a century later) to exceptional experiences as they are on-the-road or planning a trip. It would make tremendous sense for both BMW and Michelin as brands that specialize in luxury experiences.

[via @TomiAhonen via PavingWays]