A virtual pit by Georgia Tech’s Augmented Environments Lab

“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.

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vFrame, a stop-motion concept video for outdoor AR social gaming.

vFrame is ‘yet another’ concept video for an AR social gaming platform, but their decision to use stop motion for their concept video made it unique enough to set it apart from the rest.

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“Augmented Reality as a Tool for Improving the Utility of Information” by Prof. Bruce Thomas (University of South Australia)

A reasonable introduction and ‘matome’ of augmented reality technology.

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.

• iPhone ARKit: an objective C kit for making augmented reality apps for iPhone; API modeled after MapKit. http://github.com/zac/iphonearkit/
• ARmagic: a Windows-based authoring tool using ARToolKit libraries to aid in creation of marker-based augmented reality applications. http://www.i-t-business.com/ar-chudoku/index.php?pi=top [JP]

ARmedia Plug-in for Google SketchUp (and ARexporter)
http://www.inglobetechnologies.com/en/products/arplugin_su/info.php

rtPozAR (Real-Time Poser AR) [JP]
http://foilskin.seesaa.net/article/119695691.html

ARDeskTop [JP]
http://wiki.livedoor.jp/wah_wah_hawah/

ARToolKit
http://www.hitl.washington.edu/artoolkit/

ARToolKit Professional & osgART
http://www.artoolworks.com/Home.html

NyARToolKit (Java ARToolKit) [EN/JP]
http://nyatla.jp/nyartoolkit/wiki/index.php

FLARToolkit (Flash ARToolKit) [EN/JP]
http://www.libspark.org/wiki/saqoosha/FLARToolKit/en

ATOMIC Augmented Reality Authoring Tool (Front end for ARToolKit)
http://www.sologicolibre.org/projects/atomic/en/index.php

LinceoVR
http://linceovr.seac02.it/

HandyAR
http://ilab.cs.ucsb.edu/projects/taehee/HandyAR/HandyAR.html

PTAM (Parallel Tracking and Mapping for Small AR Workspaces)
http://www.robots.ox.ac.uk/~gk/PTAM/

Expect revisions and additions to this list in the future.

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.)

5 Key Concepts

01 Intersection of the real and virtual worlds: Seamless transitions between the virtual and the real through a collective of technologies called augmented reality.

02 Becoming 2D, 3D: Product design has previously been focused on 3D objects, but now is concentrating on being thin and simple like the iPhone, flat and functional like the Suica.

03 Data Becoming Objects: While industries work towards paperless offices and digital documents, there is a need for a materialization of data in some form: widgets, or digital photo frames.

04 Aesthetic balance of Digital and Analog: Although we are a society in pursuit of convenience, our instinct for human experience is inescapable. Retailers will need to provide new services and forms of human experience to fulfill the needs of digital society; balance of digital convenience, and analog warmth.

05 Value Created by Green [Eco] Movement: “Eco-activities” used to only be a part of efforts towards Corporate Social Responsibility. Now, there are efforts to be a source of direct solutions, products and services to solve these eco-related problems, such as 3D hologram technology to replace business related travel.

Following this are the 20 sample scenarios. In my next post, expect more in depth discussion of these scenarios, plus translations of some of their diagrams. Scenario titles link to their respective pages on the Fujitsu website (in Japanese).

20 Sample Scenarios

01 : Augmented Reality (Car) Window

02 : Supermarket

03 : Rural Supermarket

04 : Explorative Storybook

05 : Magnet (Slow Communication – Home)

06 : Magnet (Slow Communication – Office)

07 : Media Store

08 : Street (Street Media Store)

09 : Interactive Museum

10 : Map (Seamless Urban Transport)

11 : Trade Fair Ticket

12 : Family Restaurant (Simple Objects – Restaurant)

13 : Dining Room (Simple Objects – Home)

14 : Travel Cafe

15 : Travel (Augmented Reality Travel)

16 : Work Desk (Remote Presence Office)

17 : Contextual Meeting Room

18 : Fitness (Virtual Fitness Training)

19 : Aerobics (Virtual Air Bike)

20: Security Camera (Smiley Catch)

Video embedded after the break.

* You may need a niconico douga account to view this video. Non-Japanese speakers may want to see this guide for help on how to sign up.

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.