How to improve Reality

Hi all,

I’ve been so busy lately, so sorry for the delay. And no! I didn’t even make it to the Oktoberfest yet. But if you are around next Monday at metaio’s AR conference insideAR, just drop me a line, so we can meet up there and have a chat! We will also have a talk from RTT. Be sure to check it out and see our live demo! I’m sure it will be a rich day with lots of live demos by metaio, showing us how to improve the reality.

So, what did you miss? Tons of AR! Let me walk through a couple of nice demos, I’ve seen lately for you. And as always: don’t hesitate to submit cool demos to me, it might take a while for me to get back to you, but I’ll read it for sure. Allright:

How to improve Reality

If you have the time you should take a look at the great TED talk, Julian Oliver gave. Nice thoughts about Reality itself and of course about Augmentations of it by digitalizing bill boards, ads, etc. You might remember Oliver at least from the cube game levelhead, but he’s much more. Let’s say a multi-talented electronic artist. He triggers again the ideas of who is allowed to modify public space. Is it the building’s owner? Is it the city council? Or can anyone contribute as done in the analogue era e.g. with paint or graffiti? Can we use augmented reality to overlay ads by art? What could be next? I always love ad-busting and especially what he and his crew put together (also shown at transmediale in Berlin this year).

Augmented Cars

See a nice iphone app to augmented your possible future car right in front of you. The Russian fellows from ARDoor put up a neat demo for Audi A1 using AR.

Hope on HMDs

Diginfo News show another step forward your personal Head Mounted Display. Another retina projection solution, but in a tiny form factor. Hopefully it’s hitting the markets outside of Japan soon, too. Crunchgear has another report on the Lumus HMD glasses. Don’t miss out.

AR App it yourself!

Layar just announced their Layar Player: if you want to develop your own App and don’t want to only define your own layer into Layar, you can now use their newest release: just add the viewer into your own App and CI!
If you are keen on it and are a iphone developer, try to get beta access!

Talking about Apps: metaio’s junaio is coming to the Nokia Ovi store, soon! So, if you have a Nokia and were unable to check it out, get ready!

Augmented Feet

Another step forward point of sales systems and booth in shops: augment your shoes without the need of stinky shop-socks to put on or even untying your own shoes. We’ve seen different demos on this, but it works pretty stable and for the fun of it, here it is by Holition IBM:

Cultural Heritage

If you’ve missed it, take a look at a really great quality architectural-history solution by T-Immersion. It lets you experience places as they were ages ago by a virtual window. By turning this window around you can see your surroundings in a new way. Well, the window itself is actually not augmented. I’d love to see that step next please with a working occlusion. So, that we can have this visual quality presented combined with the real people walking through the site and being visible. :-)

Markerless fun

If you’ve missed it on my Facebook updates, you want to definitely see the Sueddeutsche Zeitung Augmented Reality edition. Check out Peter from metaio explaining the idea in this video.

And last but not least another demo of markerless tracking on a mobile device. Funny idea to let the money do the talking Monty Python style! :-)

Stay tuned! :-)