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 | 
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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.
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.
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.
Let’s jump right into the list…
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