Christmas Turkey or Christmas Turkey?

News on Apps

Need support for your translational needs? Don’t know if you got it right during your Christmas vacation abroad? Then Word Lens might have something interesting up for you. You can just hold your iphone upon a few words from some crazy language and you will see them translated and augmented to their former position!

Another new App could make your holiday trip in Europe easier, when you are stuck in the snow and X-Mas jams: Austrian company Wikitude has just released their Wikitude Drive: an augmented reality app for your Android device to get real-time navigation! Unfortunatelly so far it’s only available in Europe (Germany, Austria, Switzerland – due to the availability of the map material) and so far not for all Android devices (see list in German here). But nevertheless, take the time to see their promotional video and get ready to hit the road!!

Staying with the apps there is also news for interactive posters: Kooaba lets your take a snapshot of almost any poster in the street and gives you additional links and information.

Fun Times

More neat show cases come from different companies, like Holition with their jewelery AR or from AR Door in Russia: create your own AR-based horror, animation, fantasy or action flick and submit it to the contest! Maybe you still need an animated Christmas card. This could be it. Or you skip the presents and dig into the next AR social game for your smartphone: ARRAID.

Kinect

Many companies are fooling around (like Austrian Thrixxx trying to invent touchable erotic AR with the Kinect) and it’s hard to list all. I will have a special entry on the Kinect. Today I wanted to show the progress some people are making with the free drivers: e.g. naus3ayt on youtube shows us the before-seen occlusion, but now combined with a basic collision detection. Imagine, what could be possible, when Microsoft could really quadruple the Kinect’s resolution as Eurogamer claims to know. Then we would have 640×480 instead 320×240 IR resolutions and could be starting to think about single finger detection for AR interaction and more! Right now the USB port seems to be the bottleneck. When will they learn and put USB3.0 into the XBOX? ;-)

You might have missed…

The update on the Vuzix HMD and some specs on the Wrap 920AR

Total Immersion‘s own Conference and a Summary on their event

Layar gets supported by Intel with a big check and we can hope for some cool new inventions.

So, that’s it for today. Cheers! Enjoy your Glühwein!