Mobilizy announced today at the BlackBerry World conference that Wikitude, the augmented reality browser, would be coming preloaded on millions of BlackBerry devices.
Upon hearing the news, we immediately had two reactions. First, is this a step up for augmented reality? Does this represent a more mainstream adoption? Or is this simply a business deal and will BlackBerry users see this as bloatware on their devices?
If you've ever worked in a library, you're familiar with the drudgery of shelf reading. That's the process of verifying that all the books on a shelf are in the right order, based on their call numbers. Books get out of order fairly easily, when they're taken off the shelf and examined, for example, or when they're just stuck in the wrong place.
Miami University's Augmented Reality Research Group (MU ARRG! - that exclamation point, I confess, is my addition), led by Professor Bo Brinkman, has developed an Android app that could save librarians a lot of time and hassle. Using the Android's camera, the app "reads" a bookshelf, and with an AR overlay, quickly flags those books that are misplaced. It will also point to the correct place on the bookshelf so the book can easily be re-shelved correctly.
April 2011 will mark the 150th anniversary of the first hostilities of U.S. Civil War, and museums, municipalities, and historic sites are making their preparations for the events and exhibits to commemorate it. And while, no doubt, times are tough for funding cultural heritage projects, there's a lot of excitement and momentum building around the sesquicentennial, making it a great opportunity for those exploring how technology can make history more interactive.
"A more valuable field trip" - that's the argument that Pennsylvania high school social studies teacher Jeff Mummert makes, pointing to the increasing accessibility of both mobile and augmented reality technologies as ways to "offer deeply interactive projects for students and the general public."
To that end, Mummert has created the Civil War Augmented Reality Project (which recently evolved to become HistoriQuest). Aimed at giving both students and the general public a richer experience, the Civil War Augmented Reality Project wants to build apps that will use augmented reality to connect primary documents and photographs to local historic points of interest.
There's very little gray area on this one: You're either completely excited by the potential for built-in facial recognition combined with smartphones and social networks, or your entirely creeped out and afraid for the future of the planet.
The future is nearly here and I, for one, welcome our new overlords, who today come to us in the form of a Silicon Valley company called Viewdle that we first wrote about last October. Read on to find out how they plan to make what you see above a reality.
Omniar, a soon-to-launch startup company that offers computer vision as a service to mobile app creators, has hired serial startup leader Scott Rafer as its new CEO. A member of the Techstars family of startups, Omniar provides mobile application developers with technology that lets them identify real-world objects from mobile photographs. A little like augmented reality, a little like Google Goggles, a little like the bar-code scanner RedLaser - Omniar aims to get its technology into apps built by a wide variety of businesses, from retailers to real-estate companies to museums.
"Location must reflect human experience, and GPS comes up very short," writes new CEO Rafer on his personal blog. "Omniar has the tech to upstage GPS in a huge fraction of mobile apps. We've got an app of our own to build in order to prove it and we'll scale it up for every urban environment on Earth."
Can you imagine some of the technology world's best game play being combined with the immersive experience of a motion-controlled full-body interface? Nathan Olivarez-Giles posted the video above, from Christmas day, on the LA Times tech blog today, showing USC researchers playing the wildly popular game World of Warcraft with their bodies, using a hacked Microsoft Kinect interface and their own software. That software, called the Flexible Action and Articulated Skeleton Toolkit (FAAST), is freely available for anyone to download and train.
It's crude software so far, but the research team says they'll be making it more sophisticated with time. It looks pretty cool already.
