Hot holographic news and mobile SDKs

Today I want to share news in two different areas. For the mobile fans, I’ve got an update below and for the Kinect- and hifi-research fans, Microsoft uploaded a new video on their holographic mirror system. Enjoy!

Holoflector

The “holoflector” is a new concept from Microsoft, that combines the oh-so-great Kinect for an VirtualMirror-AR-experience. Graphics are superimposed correctly on your reflection in a mirror.
Moreover it combines the Kinect tracking with a mobile device (obviously a Windows phone) to get a better accuracy for the small movements through the phone’s gyro. Finally you see graphics hover over your device, floating nicely in your vampire mirror. Or, inverted vampire. ;-) This cool demo was freshly presented at Microsoft TechForum 2012.

Mobile SDKs

Last week, I already mentioned the latest update from metaio, featuring their 3D object tracking technology as shown in the AugmentedCity. This week, to be fair, some further news from the mobile AR field! :-)

Wikitude SDK

Wikitude ships their all new SDK. The ARchitect Engine framework enables you to do some cool new things for your wiki AR platform. Quoting from their press release:

The Wikitude ARchitect Engine is an Augmented Reality JavaScript framework embedded in an HTML web view which sits atop the Wikitude camera view and allows developers to control the objects in the camera view. With the all new Wikitude SDK, this highly efficient Augmented Reality View is now available to integrate into 3rd party apps.

Qualcomm Vuforia

Meanwhile, Qualcomm’s Augmented Reality SDK 1.5 is also now Available for commercial use. They did some big performance improvements with the Vuforia™ Augmented Reality SDK 1.5. Their own video compares the old and the new release and points out the improvements in the tracking:
http://www.qualcomm.eu/partials/video/36785

Some agencies already made good use of the improvements to bring us the x-ray look…

Layar’s Stiktu

To jump to the next mobile AR browser, Layar introduces their new creative tool to generate AR content, called Stiktu. This should serve well to create your own 3D mods to world objects… place your virtual graffiti for everyone to see! Not only in your private channel!

Stiktu How To from Stiktu on Vimeo.

Have a nice weekend to everyone!