“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.
Good morning everyone. Have a good weekend? I found a couple more resources to add to the previous list of Augmented Reality developer tools, kits, APIs etc.
iPhone ARKit: an objective C kit for making augmented reality apps for iPhone; API modeled after MapKit. http://github.com/zac/iphonearkit/
Technically I should be waiting until next week for another edition of Did You Miss It?, but this one was just too exciting for me to let slide. Students and researchers from Project Juvenile at Reality Media / Mobile Communications Lab at Ritsumeikan University in Kyoto have made an augmented reality game based on the world of Dennou Coil. System includes an HMD and ‘Data Glove’ (made with InterSense IS900), and incorporates many functions and items seen in Dennou Coil, such as metatags. Documentation video and links just after the break.
Does looking at all these demonstrations and examples of augmented reality leave you itching to make your own? Here’s a list of tools to get you started, for both marker and markerless AR. (See something missing? Let me know in the comments!)
While AR has really taken off in the news and media over the past year, there are hundreds of examples that have been missed, looked over, or forgotten either in the rush of the recent AR ‘browser wars’ and novelty ads … or simply were released before augmented reality caught everyone’s attention. Every week I’ll attempt to post a few videos and links to examples of augmented reality, demos, and toolkits to fill the gaps for those newly interested in augmented reality technology or with less time to peruse the internet for AR goodies.
I’m not sure when exactly this page was put up (last-modified date is in October), but this is the first time I’ve come across this page from Fujitsu Japan’s website. In the about section of their site, Fujitsu overviews several design concepts and areas of research they intend to cover for the year. 2009 was the AR-heavy “New Generation Experience” proposal which consists of 3 topics of research, 5 key concepts, and 20 sample scenarios. I’m sad to say I didn’t catch this before, because they put a lot of effort into slick diagrams I would have loved to see about 6 months ago. The research topics are pretty broad, bland, and what you would expect of any consumer electronics company, but the key concepts and scenarios are pretty fun. Let’s dive straight in, shall we? (I don’t see any English version of this page so I will do my best and translate and summarize.)
This was never published on ar.m-ato.me (as it happened before this blog started), but many of you will probably be familiar with Mike Clare’s AR cookies. Turns out this was not the only example of food-based fiducial marker floating around. Enter Cheese Toast AR. niconicodouga user フリスクP combines a slice of white bread, mayonnaise, pepper, a slice of cheese, nori, some clever scissor work and a toaster to render a 3D animated model of Hatsune Miku.
Last night SekaiCamera went down for maintenance, and has since returned and fixed its overseas stuck-on-download problem! Many thanks to the SekaiCamera staff for resolving this issue.
Doing my regular rounds of new AR demos and articles, I came across a fun little demo posted on もじもじTV [mojimojiTV], called Shabette Otenki Kensaku [しゃべってお天気検索]. It combines speech recognition (SR), augmented reality (AR), and the TenkiAPI (an API for weather information). Users can hold the marker before the camera, wait for the count-down, and then say a city-name. The application then uses the TenkiAPI to call current weather for the city-name used, and outputs the information using AR.
By no means meant to be an application used everyday, it’s an interesting little concept piece and definitely has me thinking about other ways we can start combing SR an AR together.
For any of you confused about the title of today’s entry and its (loose) relevance to augmented reality, keep on reading — it’s a line from Improv Everywhere’s Grocery Store Musical. Over the past two years we’ve seen a lot of amazing functional and eyecandy examples of augmented reality all over YouTube and the “blogosphere”, showcasing augmented reality technologies such as Layar and SekaiCamera (to name a couple mobile examples) and ad or promotion based AR novelties from companies like BMW and General Electric. So, back to the title… while each of these AR examples are pretty cool on their own, from time to time, I wish we could squish all these fruits together. Yes, there are events like ISMAR which bring together augmented reality enthusiasts, entrepreneurs, researchers and scientists… but there a few examples of AR that I’d like, perhaps naively, to get mashed up into a single ‘platform’.
I’m going to be honest here and openly admit that my ideal mash-up is sort of aiming for a Dennou Coil-esque augmented reality platform, and why not? Dennou Coil‘s augmented reality world was such a delightfully playful yet fairly fleshed out vision of AR, and has been a source of inspiration and excitement for augmented enthusiasts everywhere.
Since the 1.0.3 release, SekaiCamera stopped working on my iPhone. A couple days ago I sent in an email to the support staff to ask if this was related to my location (outside of Japan) and the recent update and I got a fairly quick response. Very nice, SekaiCamera!
Thank you for using Sekai Camera.
We thank you for bringing attention to this phenomenon.
Our survey has revealed that this problem is being caused by a bug in
our system.
We will attempt to fix the bug as soon as possible, hopefully within
the next week or two.
We anticipate that you will NOT need to download a revised version of
our application.
Moreover, we apologize that you (and everyone else in your region)
will not be able to use our app in the meantime, and appreciate your
patience and continued patronage.
--
Sekai Camera Support Center
support@sekaicamera.com
So that confirms it. If SekaiCamera is not working on your iPhone since 1.0.3, looks like a fix is on its way. Hold on tight, AirTaggers!
Well, not quite…
This was never published on ar.m-ato.me (as it happened before this blog started), but many of you will probably be familiar with Mike Clare’s 
For any of you confused about the title of today’s entry and its (loose) relevance to augmented reality, keep on reading — it’s a line from Improv Everywhere’s 