Keeping technology alive with the spectacle of magic (and keeping magic alive with the spectacle of technology), Marco Tempest is at TEDxTokyo performing some infrared tracking and projection visuals. (via @augmented)
Magic Projection Live @ TEDxTokyo 2010 from Marco Tempest on Vimeo.
Is it just me or does ‘un-uselessness’ look like I slammed my limbs into the keyboard at random? None the less, its been a long time since I’ve posted anything to the AR matome and today I’ve finally felt the push to post again. Since the AR Matome started, Augmented Reality ™ has really grown… and in many ways, not at all. Layar, GM’s AR, wikitude, junaio et al have grown in popularity, evolved in function and efficiency, and are all expressions and platforms of these digital gestures we make to better understand and navigate the world around us. Through these gestures we find real estate and restaurants, float 3D dinosaurs in space and shoot virtual ghosts pasted over what would otherwise be the blasé real world. These apps are voted up, ranked down, downloaded, purchased, shared, installed and deleted in short sporadic moments across markets; now we’ve hit the trough of disillusionment. We all knew it was coming. For some of us it came sooner than others. Don’t get me wrong, I still have faith in augmented reality. But most of this disillusionment, dissatisfaction, sour taste in my mouth comes from a particular death in creative futurism caused by a drive for utility, functionality and usefulness engendered by the culture of The AppStore: Fast, Easy, Bite-Sized, No-strings-attached. A utopian vision of Augmented Reality ™ revolutionizing the web, metadata and the way we live. Yes, I’m saying that the market-place, and essentially culture of ubiquitous computing, is the system responsible for killing the futurist imagination I believe is necessary to make augmented reality a ‘successful’ and interesting technology.
… plug it, play it, burn it, rip it, drag and drop it, zip, unzip it…
Have our technological pursuits changed since the inception of the AppStore? Probably not. We’ve always been pushing for harder better faster stronger. The labs still exist, augmented reality is still researched and developed across academic institutions. But something about the AppStore changed our attitude about technological convenience, and very strongly affects the Augmented Reality ™ industry’s position on AR’s role as a tool of technological convenience. This, combined with the sensitivity AR and AR ™ enthusiasts and professionals to Gartner’s Hype-cycle, made a hypersensitivity to the practical use of our beloved technology.
Total Immersion, known for AR baseball cards and other AR works, teamed up with Hanwa Co. to make an interactive haunted house. Amusement park-esque augmented reality is not new for Total Immersion, and their white paper on the “Augmented Reality Video Gun” has been up on their website since October 2009. A video documentation of it was uploaded just today.
ARt, Bizarre AR, Demos, Games | 
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Good on you, V2_ Institute. You’ve really brought together a truly diverse group of participants from all walks of life and work. Apart from the hum-drum of the regular “AR” (*ahem*… AR-GPS or Augmented Navigation really…) players from Layar and Wikitude, it looks like they had a fair collection of creative, abstract, narrative and magic augmented reality demonstrations and concepts. Presentations looked a bit bland… I really have a problem with these phrases and terms like “re-create the past” when the example shown is no more than a static 3D model plastered over a physical POI (I could have just taken a brochure from somewhere and held it up for a similar enough effect). Ah well. Inviting the ‘big boys’ over to play is a necessary evil for events like this.
Event Program Outline and Information (Dec 4th, 2009)
Here’s a “teaser” video of the event. Perhaps more video content is on the way? (Please?)
Layar and Wikitude are special guests at first ever Ecosystem event for people in Augmented Reality. Hosted by V2_ Institute for the Unstable Media and PortalToYourDreams. Artists mingled with developers, city planners and industry in this interactive cross-sector gathering. Special talks on fashion business, aura recognition, AR storytelling and the magic couch :-)
For more intellectual and creative stimulation, visit the V2_ website.
Another video released just a couple days ago using augmented reality markers as alternative interface and controller for parameters in music programs… in this case, Quartz Composer. I’m not familiar with Quartz Composer so I can’t tell you much detail apart from what the video description and in-video commentary says. Work by Rishabh Rajan.
Augmented Reality in Quartz Composer used to generate OSC messages to manipulate parameters of Buffer Override as an insert in an audio track.
Just a preview, and how you can use the ARDJ software with ableton… basically me messing around with it. Talking about the software a bit and how it works. :) Enjoy!
Get the software free at http://www.lipert.net/ardj
A lot of buzz around AR has been around its use as a means to either modify the information we see about the world around us, gaming, or ‘magic’ (as described in a previous post). Earlier this last week we saw AR not as a result, but as a means input or control in “Home automation through augmented reality” which used QR codes as markers to activate objects around the house. The end result does not involve any augmented or modified vision or perception, but rather, real life changes in physical objects and environments (on or off, dark room or bright room). This example very loosely qualifies as ‘augmented reality’ in my book, but is not undeserving of attention from the AR community as a example of computer vision with (long winded) real world application (not efficiency, but visible to us without aid of a device). ARDJ sort of follows this same track in its purpose– it provides an alternative means of control of particular parameters. The end results is again, not visual. AR or not? Meeeh—- but it is a reminder that AR doesn’t have to be related to navigation or information overlay, and can exist as a broader, more creative technology allowing for organic human gesture and manipulation to come into play.
We’re on a bit of a roll here lately with examples of AR without ‘practical’ functionality; for creative expression, exploration and potential as a medium to deliver immersive narrative. Hats off to you, Georgia Tech, you pump out these fantastic ideas like a factory! You can see this, and other projects from the Augmented Environments Lab at their website.
A final project for DVFX 2009 at Georgia Tech. The video is an advertisement for a Georgia Tech Augmented Environments Lab project to create an augmented reality storytelling application. One of the examples for this project was Alice in Wonderland, which serves as a basis for our video.
ARt, Demos, Games, Make Your AR | 1 Comment »
It’s been a while since we’ve seen some AR magic or ARt, hasn’t it? Here’s some projection work by “virtual magician” Marco Tempest in Tokyo. It’s really refreshing to see some augmented reality that retracts back into the magic (magic as mystery, not performance entertainment, though it is coincidentally so) of technology.
Technical details available via Create Digital Motion.
First thing I pulled from my fishing nets this morning was a nice matome/roundup of computer vision demos on Youtube which included a demo for “BriefCam”. The narration was a bit painful to go through, but the demo itself was impressive. BriefCam indexes, summarizes, and compresses events in video logs from surveillance cameras in a way I can’t quite explain ((maybe that’s why the narration was in staccato)), and most certainly sparked my imagination in terms of the future of computer vision capabilities in augmented reality environments — particularly the possibilities of compressing perception of time.
AR Futures, Computer Vision, Corporate AR, Demos | 2 Comments »
This week’s DYMI videos are totally unrelated to eachother again, but are worth watching.
“This video shows an augmented reality application we have developed to use as an experimental testbed for evaluating what components of an AR experience contribute to a user feeling “present” or immersed. In this experiment the participants are presented with a virtual hole that drops three stories and are asked to perform tasks around this “pit.” Their heart rate, galvanic skin response, and skin temperature are measured while the participant is shown different versions of the pit. The goal is to develop quantitative and qualitative methods for measuring how immersed a user is in an AR experience and to develop guidelines for people building AR applications.”
This is really cool. I’m always interested to see experiments related to the psychological effect of AR and mixed reality in general. Their website contains a little library of publications related to their research in AR as well.
