Collaborative Thinking: AugmentedReality

A jumpstart to an emerging and fascinating space:

Startups looking to make money by enhancing reality | VentureBeat
Augmented reality (AR) technology, which overlays 3-D graphics or information over a live camera feed, isn’t a brand-new idea. But now that smartphones are penetrating the mass market, AR may be on the cusp of wide adoption. Imagine traveling to a foreign country, pointing your camera at a building and having it up pull up a trove of historical information, video and images of the place over the past century.Two early AR services are SPRXMobile’s Layar (in the Netherlands) and Tonchidot’s Sekai Camera (in Japan), which dig up real estate, job listings or user-generated tags when you point an Android-based phone or iPhone at buildings. Gaming companies are using augmented reality technology by building 3-D animations that appear on screen for games that interact with a player’s physical surrounding. There are a few examples floating around like this one of an augmented reality, zombie-killing game from Georgia Tech, although few are in commercial use yet. Other areas of augmented reality, like marketing and promotions, are a bit gimmicky, especially since most seem to rely on Web cams or stationary video cameras and are not compatible with smartphones yet. For sales applications of augmented reality, the eventual idea would be to walk down a store aisle, point the camera on your phone at a box and see an animation related to what’s inside.

Startups looking to make money by enhancing reality | VentureBeat

Augmented reality finds you organic food, London tube stops

A few more augmented reality applications came out after we published a primer on the space last week. Augmented reality blends real-world video feeds with 3-D graphics or information overlays. Imagine taking your iPhone or Android phone’s camera out while traveling abroad, panning around in a town square and seeing history, photos and video from the past superimposed over the viewfinder.

Augmented reality finds you organic food, London tube stops | VentureBeat

Augmented Reality & The Web: Present and Future Scenarios

Augmented Reality (AR) is when virtual graphics and/or data are overlaid onto real world objects. Many of you have seen this portrayed in movies such as Minority Report and The Matrix. It still seems a bit far fetched in 2009, yet there are apps that are beginning to make it a reality. There are many potential scenarios for AR. A popular one is doing your grocery shopping and checking information on your mobile phone (or AR glasses!) about price, specials, reviews, comparisons with competing products, etc. With the rise of RFID chips and technology such as that being developed by Microsoft, this type of scenario isn't too far away. Another interesting consideration is that social software will have a big role to play in future AR apps. For example when walking down the street, you could use your mobile phone to point to a restaurant, and overlaid on a photo of the restaurant would be customer reviews, recommendations, and other relevant user generated data. (inspiration from Rafael Torres)

Augmented Reality & The Web: Present and Future Scenarios

Augmented Reality: Here's Our Wishlist of Apps, What's On Yours?
There's another dimension present, everywhere we go, that a growing number of technologists are working to uncover. These people aren't talking about theoretical physics or a magical world of fairies and gnomes - they're talking about information that could offer more context to traditionally physical lived experience. Augmented Reality (AR) is the phrase being used and this practice of making layers of data available on top of real world experiences could be a big one soon. Improvements in geolocation, bandwidth, mobile devices and APIs are the foundation of this feeling that a useful Augmented Reality may be more realistic today than ever before. AR isn't new, but it's been pretty hokey so far. Now there's a movement to make it really worth doing. It's still such a fanciful prospect that we decided to publish our wish list for Augmented Reality apps we hope someone builds. We also posted some of the most interesting recent AR videos from around the web. Check it all out and share your thoughts.

Augmented Reality: Here's Our Wishlist of Apps, What's On Yours?

Augmented Reality: Part 1, The Basics
Remember in Terminator when you get to see what the Terminator is looking at? A red-colored filter is slapped over the lens and a bunch of text, numbers, names of people, ranges to targets, and other interpretive tools appear in the view. The question is, why does a robot need all that text? He’s certainly not reading it. However, every human viewer instantly understood that this was the Terminator’s machine perspective on the world. Instead of just seeing things as we do, he made explicit informatics around each object so as to analyze and interpret it. If we look at a pen on our desk, our brain does the same thing. We can tell that this cylinder is about 6 inches long. It's black with a ribbed barrel and a cap. Somewhere in our experience we have seen this basic form before, and we have used it to write letters or take notes. All of those calculations--called object recognition and context regocnition--have to happen in the blink of an eye. Once we identify an object, we can see that object’s pattern repeated around us and instantly identify it. We see this system in practice every day, but it becomes more evident when we are faced with an object that doesn’t fit our model. Imagine a sphere: It’s glossy red, has a power cord coming out of one side, a seam in the middle, a dimple on one side and vents on the other. Now, imagine you're told this sphere is a toaster. Most people would respond, “I’ve never seen a toaster like that before.” But then it's added to the list of possible toasters in your head. Next time, you can recognize it instantly.

WTF Augmented Reality: Part 1, The Basics « MobileBehavior See Also: Augmented Reality: Part 2, Real World Applications « MobileBehavior

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