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.
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.
Aru Majiro - Mascot of ARmagic
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.
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!)
Augmented Reality Car Window, Fujitsu (c)2009
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.
Video embedded after the break.
read more »
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.
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!
Google trends query "augmented reality"
Playing with Google trends today and seeing some fantastic stats on the state of public interest in augmented reality. The graph to the left shows the search volume index (average number of searches for query represented as 1.0), with the first significant spike of 2009 in early March.
How can we protect ourselves from something like:
Downhill slope of search volume for "virtual reality"
… from happening in the future? After all, Gartner’s 2009 hype-cycle shows Augmented Reality as being well on its way to the peak of inflated expectations and into the trough of disillusionment.
Let’s take a look at the Nintendo Virtual Boy. Shipping only approximately 800,000 units worldwide since its conception (for comparison, the newer Nintendo Wii console has shipped 52.62 million units globally since its release in later 2006), this head-mounted display game console was an absolute failure despite being conceived in a time and attitude very warm to the idea of virtual reality. The device itself was awkward and head-ache inducing. The prospect of flying around in virtual worlds was so attractive, yet immersive virtual reality never really made it to the mainstream consumer apart from the occasional trip to the local arcade (read: VR Tron game). What advantage does (mobile) augmented reality have over cases like the Virtual Boy? Ubiquity, ubiquity, ubiquity.
While U.S. smartphone penetration is said to be only around 15 – 19%, and app retention rates are less than flattering, it is a number that is growing, and the market is still far from reaching its full potential. When everyone already has the device — the console — augmented reality can and will flourish if the industry plays their cards right.
