Augmented reality - WOW there's lots of it about

Hi all and welcome to 2010. I'm getting off to a slow start dealing with jet lag post South African trip... always love that place.

Anyway, for the first post of the year i thought I'd clump together a load of interseting examples from the AR bandwagon. Definitely not going away and it's really starting to look like it something actually useful

First a look at AR vs VR from Techcrunch

Augmented Reality Vs. Virtual Reality: Which One Is More Real?

by Erick Schonfeld on January 6, 2010

Remember when virtual reality was all the rage? It had a good run, especially during the 1990s, and perhaps culminating with Second Life in the decade which just closed. But virtual reality is old in the tooth. People are a lot more interested these days in “augmented reality,”surpassed “virtual reality” as a search term sometime last summer (see chart). or at least they are on Google where it

Maybe people are searching for it more just because they are not sure what it means, but it definitely is entering the collective consciousness. If virtual reality is a complete immersion in a digital world, augmented reality (AR) is more a digital overlay onto the real world. It enhances the real world with digital data, and therefore it is much more interesting than a completely fabricated environment. There is an element of magic to AR apps because they juxtapose data and graphics where they have no business showing up.

The advent of touchscreen mobile phones with GPS and cameras such as the iPhone and Android phones is giving rise to an array of AR apps from Sekai Camera, Layar, and more. Generally, these apps show the world around you as seen through your phone’s camera, but in addition to functioning as a viewfinder, your screen also functions as a regular computer screen. With help from the GPS and on-board compass, it can place information or graphics on top of buildings or objects seen through the viewfinder.

But that is just the start. Universityresearch labs are springing up to explore augmented realty as a new computing interface. The latest AR app is the Parrot AR.Drone, and combines a flying remote controlled toy with an iPhone app. The app turns the iPhone into a remote control (a concept we’ve seen applied to video games), but there is also a camera on the drone, which let’s you see from its point of view and play virtual shoot ‘em up games with other drones. The shooting happens on the screen, while the toys fly through the air in real life. There is also a solo mode where you can shoot enemy jets on the screen juxtaposed into your living room or wherever you happen to be flying the drone. (Watch the video below to see what I mean).

You can take your virtual reality and get lost on Second Life. I’ll take augmented reality any day. It’s just more real.

Secondly, a list of the seven things you need to know about AR from the Guardian (thanks Simon)

Seven things you need to know about augmented reality

Smartphones are bringing the once-SF concept of augmented reality into the everyday world

Augmented reality: the Nearest Tube iPhone app

Augmented reality is a lively creative mess. Now that smartphones have relieved us from unstylish fantasies of goggles, the technology is finally getting real. In 2010, the world is becoming subtitled, and your future will be augmented.

Augmented reality applications enable users to see additional layers of data when they view normal objects through smartphones or webcams.

Since programming an augmented reality application is easy, every computer student can develop augmented software for a smartphone. Very many of them are. These days, applications mushroom everywhere a bit of augmentable content is to be found.

As in the early days on the internet it is a wild augmented west, and so you need a guide. In part one of our review, we highlight the seven most important things the informed user of today needs to know about augmented reality.

Part two will focus on journalism and augmented reality.

1. Layar

Layar is paving the way. As the witty Japanese introduction illustrates, Layar makes use of the smartphone camera and compass. As you look on your screen information is overlayed on top of the world surrounding you.

A lot of augmented reality applications allow that, but what makes Layar so appealing is that it allows external developers to submit, well, layers, a decision that helped it to become the most flourishing augmented reality application even though it is only available for the Android phones and not ready for the iPhone.

Popular examples are Wikitude, which presents data about nearby points of interest, or Yelp which is providing reviews of nearby restaurants, shopping and nightlife possibilities. Since it can be used for any form of data there is even an application showing where hundreds of billions of US dollars of US recovery funding got spent.

2. Pathfinder

Lost? Among the most popular applications at the moment are travel applications, perfect for augmented reality. Nearest Tube, London Tube and London Bus help you handy to find your way through London, but of course there is an application for nearly every large city by now.

Several astronomical applications transform you into an 21st century explorer, such as the Heads Up Navigator, the sympathetic old school Theodolite and Sun Seeker or Accrossair. And there will be more to come, as a world full of subtitles makes perfect sense for lost travellers.

3. WordSnug, the essential sympathetic nerd tool

If you find yourself holding tight to your laptop on the street seeking somewhere with free Wi-Fi, download WorkSnug. It's a navigation app on the same principle as the nearest-tube-applications, but also provides you with information about Wi-Fi spots' power supply and coffee quality, and makes it easy to get in touch with other lonesome nerds.

At the moment WorkSnug is only available for the iPhone and in London, but it's coming to Madrid, Barcelona, Berlin and Paris in February before hitting San Francisco and New York in March.

4. Let me entertain you

The addition of an 3D object is another important augmented reality feature. Several games already make use of this: Mosquitos, Wanted Dead or Alive, and Firefighter 360 place targets in the world surrounding you while the multiplayer game Gunman simply uses the T-shirt colour of your friends.

If you are not a bloodthirsty teenager but a knackered parent you should get The Hidden Park, a game that combines technology and outdoor experience; this neatly designed iPhone game keeps your child busy in London's Kensington Gardens or South Bank, New York's Central Park or Munich's Englische Garten.

So after the interactive media artists Blast Theory have already tested what's possible in urban gaming, and augmented reality will boost this further. Yet to be invented is the augmented reality movie, but you can watch an early version of what might be to come in the video above.

5. Everyday use

One thing that's striking about augmented reality is that it is so everyday. In 2009, applications were developed for a lot of different day-to-day situations. They help you find your car, test the size of the parcel you packed before you go to the post office, arrange and test new furniture, or present information about the food you're buying like the one Giuseppe Costanza developed at London's Central Saint Martin's for the communication design course.

6. Why not the other way around? Augmented virtuality

Interact with your computer using the physical world: SixthSense uses natural hand gestures to interact with the computer. It projects the screen on your hand or any other surface using a tiny small wearable gestural interface. Developed by the Fluid Interfaces Group of the MIT Media Lab, this application is yet to be mass-marketed but pretty impressive.

7. If you want to stay on top of things, have a look at the following blogs

2010 will be the year where augmented reality will reach the mass market, because finally smartphones are widely available, the applications are easy to use and pretty useful. To stay on top of developments, follow the London based Augmented Planet blog run by Lester Madden, The Augmented Times, or Games Alfresco, which is a bit more dedicated to the reinvention of interactive entertainment.

If you really wanna dig deep, get down with augmented reality guru Bruce Sterling, who recently gave a keynote about the dawn of the augmented reality industry.

Watch out for part two of our special on augmented reality and journalism.

And finally, from Springwise, a cool Layar app making AR useful in a tough environment... the madness of a music festival... assuming that anyone is sober enough to operate their phone that is.

Just a month or so after augmented reality browser Layar won EUR 75,000 in Vodafone's Mobile Clicks contest, the technology was already being put to work in a custom-designed application for Louisiana's Voodoo Experience music festival.

Layar is a free mobile browser for Android devices and the iPhone that overlays computer-generated information on top of real-time, on-screen images from the handset's built-in camera. The Voodoo app was designed by New Orleans ad firm Zehnder Communications using Layar 2.0 to let festival-goers with enabled phones get information on performances, attractions and services simply by pointing their phone cameras toward key parts of the festival grounds. When viewing concert stages, for instance, one custom AR layer provided information on lineups, schedules and current artists performing, including artist profiles and Web links. Pointing a phone camera at a vendor would show menus and pricing, while other points of interest highlighted by the app included vendor locations, artist displays, restrooms, ATMs, entrances and exits, medical sites and other services. Zehnder was one the first 50 firms worldwide named as developers of the Layar platform. A demo of the Voodoo app is available on Vimeo.

In addition to a whole new world of entertainment and useful information for mobile consumers, augmented reality also opens up a wealth of new OFF=ON opportunities for advertisers. Time to explore the possibilities for *your* tech-savvy brand...?

Website: www.z-comm.com
Contact: jzehnder@z-comm.com

5 Best Data Visualization Projects of the Year – 2009

Thanks Flowing Data - For my money and what i'm sensing from clients, 2010 is going be the year for data in OZ.

Cheers and have a great xmas & new year everyone. I'm off on holiday!

By Nathan / Dec 16, 2009 to Visualization / 15 comments

It was a huge year for data. There's no denying it. Data is about to explode.

Applications sprung up left and right that help you understand your data - your Web traffic, your finances, and your life. There are now online marketplaces that sell data as files or via API. Data.gov launched to provide the public with usable, machine-readable data on a national scale. State and local governments followed, and data availability expands every day.

At the same time, there are now tons of tools that you can use to visualize your data. It's not just Excel anymore, and a lot of it is browser-based. Some of the tools even have aesthetics to boot.

It's exciting times for data, indeed.

Data has been declared sexy, and the rise of the data scientist is here.

With all the new projects this year, it was hard to filter down to the best, but here they are: two honorable mentions and the five best data visualization projects of 2009. Visualizations were chosen based on analysis, aesthetics, and most importantly, how well they told their story (or how well they let you tell yours).

Honorable Mention: MTV VMA Tweet Tracker

The MTV VMA Tweet Tracker, a glorified bubble chart from Stamen Design and Radian6, showed the buzz on Twitter over the MTV VMAs. As I watched iJustine talk about the visualization on television, pointing out highlights in the bubbles and tags, I thought, "Visualization sure has branched out." Plus, the explosion of Kanye West's face on my computer screen was hilarious.

Honorable Mention: Crisis of Credit Visualized

We all know there were major problems going on with banks and credit this year, but it's a safe bet that most didn't quite know why. Jonathan Jarvis attempted to explain with his thesis project, Crisis of Credit Visualized. It isn't perfect, and it doesn't explain every detail, but it does explain a lot.

5. Photosynth

Photosynth, by Microsoft Live Labs, smartly strings photos together to create something of a browsable 3-D environment. It was actually released last year. I don't think it was really put to good use until this year though. With the inauguration of President Barack Obama, a historic event people won't soon forget, MSNBC used Photosynth to provide a view of the inaugural stands.

4. The Jobless Rate for People Like You

Unemployment rate was another important and recurring topic this year, and there were a lot of visualizations - maps, bar charts, and graphics - that showed it. None did it better than Shan Carter, Amanda Cox, and Kevin Quealy of The New York Times. In The Jobless Rate for People Like You, we were able to see the changes over time and filter down to different demographics. Transitions and browsability were top notch.

3. OpenStreetMap: A Year of Edits

OpenStreetMap: A Year of Edits showed all the changes to OpenStreetMap data in 2008. The visualization itself, by ITO, is beautiful, and what the animated map represents - a worldwide effort in providing an accurate geographic data source - is even more amazing.

2. Protovis

Protovis, from the Stanford visualization guys Mike Bostock and Jeffrey Heer, is a "graphical approach to visualization." More importantly, it uses Javascript and SVG for web-native visualizations, which is where things are headed with, uh, visualization on the Web. True, there are plenty of Javascript libraries that let you make basic graphs, but none are nearly this advanced, and true, Protovis doesn't work in all browsers, but if you're reading this, you're probably smart enough to be on a modern browser, unless you're locked into Internet Explorer at work.

1. On the Origin of Species: The Preservation of Favoured Traces

On the Origin of Species, by Ben Fry, shows the changes to Charles Darwins' theory of evolution over time. I think a lot of you missed this one, because I posted it on Labor Day, but nevertheless, it's an elegant visual. It's a simple concept executed really well. Origin shows the full growing (and shrinking) text as little blocks with an emphasis on the evolution of Darwin's ideas. They were 20 years in the making.

Origins is actually an offshoot of a much larger project yet to be released (if ever), according to Fry, so I'm of course really looking forward to seeing the rest.

There you have it. It's the top five visualizations of 2009. There was a lot of great stuff churned out this year, and no doubt next year will be even better.

Back to you - what do you think was the best visualization of the year? Leave your picks in the comments below.

Google goggles

Found this a while ago and forgot to post it. Yet another useful AR app on andriod. Thanks Mashable

Put on Your Google Goggles and Visually Search the World

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Google’s breaking news left and right today. Of course the big news is that real-time search is live, but the release of Google Goggles can’t be overlooked. The brand-new addition to Google Labs is an experimental application for Android devices that supports visual search.

How does it work? Just open the app, snap a photo and voilà: Google () will process the image and return search results. The photo search functionality eliminates the need to type or say anything on your mobile device, and it adds context to your real-world surroundings.

While the technology is pretty remarkable, Google admits that it is still in its infancy. So while some image searches work brilliantly — think photos of books, business cards, artwork, places, logos and landmarks — don’t be too disappointed if your image searches for food, animals, plants and cars are less than stellar.

Still, the application should prove useful, and we hope to see versions of it made available for other smartphone users as well. For now, though, iPhone () users can turn to a number of different augmented reality applications for camera-enabled search functionality.

Watch the video below for a demonstration of Google Goggles.

Is there anything you can't do with twitter!?

Thanks PSFK

Twoddler Allows Toddlers To Communicate Through Twitter

December 7, 2009

Combining an Arduino microcontroller with a Fisher Price Activity Center, Bart Swennen, Gert Vos, and Johannes Taelman have put together a device which allows toddlers to communicate non-verbally with their caretakers through Twitter. Dubbed ‘Twoddler,” the device captures data from toddler interactions within the activity center and translates them to tweets that can be followed by the toddler’s parents; the toddler mashing the image of his mother for a predetermined amount of time might be translated to a tweet like ‘I’d like to see my mommy now.”

INCA Award 2009 WINNER: Twoddler from IBBT on Vimeo.

The project is the 2009 winner of the Innovative and Creative Applications Award.

[via CNET]

Explore a whole new way to window shop, with Google and your mobile phone

Nice development from Google

12/07/2009 06:00:00 AM

What if you could decide where to shop, eat or hang out, with a little help from local Google users?

It might take you a while to ask them all, so to make it easier we've launched a new effort to send window decals to over 100,000 local businesses in the U.S. that have been the most sought out and researched on Google.com and Google Maps. We're calling these businesses the "Favorite Places on Google" and you'll now start to find them in over 9,000 towns and cities, in all 50 states. You can also explore a sample of the Favorite Places in 20 of the largest U.S. cities at google.com/favoriteplaces. Each window decal has a unique bar code, known as a QR code that you can scan with any of hundreds of mobile devices — including iPhone, Android-powered phones, BlackBerry and more — to take you directly to that business's Place Page on your mobile phone. With your mobile phone and these new decals, you can easily go up to a storefront and immediately find reviews, get a coupon if the business is offering one or star a business as a place you want to remember for the future. Soon, you'll be able to leave a review on the mobile page as well, just like on your desktop.


To scan the codes, you'll need a phone with a camera and an app that can read QR codes. For Android-powered devices, including the Droid by Motorola, we recommend using the free Barcode Scanner app. For iPhone, we have found the $1.99 QuickMark app to work best, and starting today, we're partnering with QuickMark to offer the app for free for the first 40,000 downloads. For other devices, we recommend searching for "QR reader" in your app marketplace, if it has one, or searching for the model of your phone and [qr reader] on Google. BeeTagg and NeoReader are two other apps that we've found to work well with the decals.

Here's a video that shows you how this all works:



This launch is part of our overall effort — online and offline — to provide you with the best local business results whenever you're trying to figure out where to go, whether it's a trendy Cuban restaurant in Philly, a comics shop in L.A., a hip hotel in NYC or a little bit of photographic history in Rochester, N.Y.

We plan to periodically send out new waves of window decals to qualifying businesses. If you own or manage a business and were selected as a Favorite Place, you may have already received your decal or, for most of you, it will arrive by mail in the next one to two weeks. If you weren't selected in this round, your first step is to claim your listing with Google's Local Business Center for free. That will help us determine that your business information is correct. Then, you can enhance your local business listing by adding enhanced content like photos and videos.

To explore a gallery of several hundred Favorite Places in 20 U.S. cities, to learn more about how to use the QR codes and to find out how your business can get involved, check out google.com/favoriteplaces.

Posted by Ryan Hayward & David Kim, Product Marketing Managers

Universal Platforms for Virtual Goods and Social Currency

Thanks Mobile Behaviour for this on Viximo's interesting offering for virtual economies

Social currency and virtual goods have kept online gamers locked in their basements for years. Then Facebook introduced us to the virtual gift, and digital birthday cakes became badges of honor. Now game dynamics are becoming an increasingly popular way to encourage behavior online and on mobile, turning life into one big game.

A new startup called Viximo is looking to help smaller social sites build their own virtual goods platforms. Their turnkey solution includes an embeddable gift store, showcase and microtransaction system.

"Our virtual goods solution is designed to provide social networks with a powerful solution they can grow with, yet spend only a week integrating," said Brian Balfour Founder and VP of Product Marketing at Viximo. "This allows web publishers to focus on their core business--engaging their audience--while we provide their users with targeted and merchandised virtual goods through a well vetted and integrated system."

Viximo's solution supports various types of virtual currencies including cash, reward, mixed, or dual currency systems, and aggregates the best payment methods including one click credit card purchasing, PayPal, mobile, and CPA offers.

Techcrunch points out that Viximo’s ‘universal giftbox’ option, which allows for a gift given on one site to also appear on another site, could be both confusing and ugly. This is a good point, but it would be great to see some standardization across networks, not just for virtual goods but for all the gaming elements we're seeing built into social networks and media sites.

Thought Starter:

With the proliferation of “leaderboards” – the hot new SNS accessory that quantify site activity (see Foursquare, Fashism, Hypemachine, Learnvest…)—there’s an opportunity to create a points exchange. So just like you can use your frequent flier miles on partner airlines, you could redeem currencies on partner sites. Or how about a platform that aggregates social currencies and lets you redeem them for branded rewards?

Google wave - 5 case studies

Thanks Mashable for this first look at how the Wave is being applied.

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The Google Wave invite rollout extravaganza started more than a month ago. While in some respects the buzz around Google Wave has started to subside, the term is still constantly one of the top trending topics on Twitter, and new gadgets, extensions, and applications are now starting to appear on a daily basis.

Each day more and more people are opening up their email inbox to find an invite to Google Wave (). With that shiny new invite comes the inevitable quest for ideas about to how to put the medium to good use.

Should you happen to be one of those people, we’ve got a number of different resources that you can use to get up to speed with Google Wave. This time around, however, we wanted to look at how people are actually using it now. From process modelling and customer service, to project collaboration, annotation, and gaming, the examples listed here highlight the power of the newborn medium, and in part, showcase what we can expect as the platform matures.

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1. SAP Gravity: Modeling within Google Wave

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Understanding the power of real-time collaboration and its relevance to clients, SAP Research in Australia () has developed a business process modeling tool called Gravity that works within Google Wave.

The sophisticated tool, which can be embedded within a Wave as a gadget, allows for team members to remotely build complex models in unison, or after catching up via playback, without having to leave Google Wave.

Gravity and Google Wave work together harmoniously to create a modeling environment that appears to be just as robust as, if not more flexible than, expensive desktop software built for the same purpose.

We think SAP is certainly on to something here, and we encourage you to watch the video demonstration of Gravity in Google Wave in action.

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2. Salesforce: Google Wave for Customer Service

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Salesforce, like SAP, has figured out that they can use the Google Wave platform to support client needs and tackle real-life problems. As such, Salesforce has created a Google Wave extension that clients can use to help automate, and even personalize, the customer service experience.

Watch the demonstration video to see how the Salesforce extension gives customers the ability to use Google Wave to interact with an automated support robot. Of course, customers can request assistance from a human within the Wave as well.

What makes this example stand out is the fact that not only is the Google Wave dialogue being stored as a case record within Salesforce, but, because the robot is connected to the Salesforce Service Cloud, the robot can access previously stored customer data for tailored service. Ultimately, Salesforce has found a way to potentially save clients money on customer service efforts, all the while maintaining active records, with the assistance of Google Wave.

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3. Mingle: Integrated Project Collaboration

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Mingle is a project management and team collaboration tool developed by ThoughtWorks Studios, who realized that they could add Mingle’s project management metadata to conversations in Google Wave.

The integration is still a work in progress, but a demonstration of the concept was highlighted at Enterprise 2.0, and the basic idea is to give Google Wave users/Mingle clients the ability to bring their Mingle task data, which takes the form of cards, into Google Wave. Existing Mingle cards can be embedded into Wave conversation threads, and new Mingle cards/tasks can be created within Google Wave.

This particular use case highlights how Google Wave can work with existing project management systems for more streamlined and cohesive communication, creating parity regardless of where the user is accessing project data.

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4. Ecomm Conference: Annotating a Live Event

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Just last week our CEO, Pete Cashmore, wrote about how the savvy people behind the Ecomm conference doled out Wave accounts to attendees so that they could collaborate, in real-time, to annotate presentation content. The result was arguably a much better way to consume conference content than attempting to follow hashtag tweets on Twitter ().

You can read the full account, which was documented by Charlie Osmond, on the FreshNetworks blog, but here’s an excerpt that we think drives home the utility of the use case.

“Here’s what happened: an audience member would create a Google Wave and others in the audience would edit the wave during the presentation. The result would be a crowd-sourced write-up of the presentation: a transcript of key points and a record of audience comments.”

We happen to think this particular use case is genius, especially for content-rich seminars and events where attendees are typically taking their own individual notes. With the shared Google Wave experience they can combine forces to create a more meaningful and accurate recounting of information shared in conference sessions.

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5. Gamers: Google Wave RPGs

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A very detailed Ars Technica post highlights that there’s a growing collection of Google Wave users who are using the medium to play wave-borne RPGs (role playing games). As mentioned in the post, there’s a even a Wave dedicated to serving as an index for all the Wave RPGs currently in existence, and the last time we counted it included upwards of 300 contributing members, and a combination of 30 different ideas or full-fledged games.

According to Jon Stokes, the author of the post, Google Wave is adequate for some RPGs, but it could certainly be improved to allow for a more enjoyable experience. In the excerpt below, Stokes describes the current RPG () experience within Google Wave:

“The few games I’m following typically have at least three waves: one for recruiting and general discussion, another for out-of-character interactions (”table talk”), and the main wave where the actual in-character gaming takes place. Individual players are also encouraged to start waves between themselves for any conversations that the GM shouldn’t be privy to. Character sheets can be posted in a private wave between a player and the GM, and character biographies can go anywhere where the other players can get access to them.

The waves are persistent, accessible to anyone who’s added to them, and include the ability to track changes, so they ultimately work quite well as a medium for the non-tactical parts of an RPG. A newcomer can jump right in and get up-to-speed on past interactions, and a GM or industrious player can constantly maintain the official record of play by going back and fixing errors, formatting text, adding and deleting material, and reorganizing posts. Character generation seems to work quite well in Wave, since players can develop the shared character sheet at their own pace with periodic feedback from the GM.”