Imagine taking a picture using your smartphone and immediately having all of your Facebook friends automatically tagged, without even visiting the website, the app, or looking at the picture itself. This is the future that Viewdle plans to make a reality.
We spoke with Jason Mitura, the chief product officer for Viewdle, and he told us that the company would offer a real change in facial recognition technology by taking the process out of the cloud and into the device itself.
There is no denying that Steve Jobs has mastered the art of the keynote, but some might say his style is getting a little old and predictable. Many of Jobs' presentations are certain to kickoff with some statistical data overview, then launch into descriptions of new products loaded with verbiage like "magical," and of course, "boom." And who could forget the ever-popular "one more thing."
Perhaps Jobs needs to add some flare to his next presentation - mix things up a bit. If that's the case, then he need look no farther than SingTel's Bill Chang who used augmented reality to wow the audience at i.luminate, the company's business innovations conference.
Today at the RIM (Research in Motion) developer conference, the BlackBerry makers introduced a new member to it's family - the BlackBerry PlayBook. The PlayBook is a 7-inch "professional" touch screen tablet device which features a 1024x600 display, multi-touch gestures and a 1 GHz dual-core processor. One of the more interesting features, for fans of augmented reality (AR) at least, is the device's pair of front- and rear-facing cameras, both of which can shoot HD video.
Writer and illustrator Tony DiTerlizzi is the author of several young adult fantasy novels, including the popular series The Spiderwick Chronicles. Earlier this week, his latest book, The Search for WondLa hit bookshelves in U.S., and within it featured an interactive augmented reality experience readers could unlock using their Web browsers. The book, published by Simon & Schuster, is one of the first of its kind and could be a glimpse into how kids will enjoy reading in the future.
One of the most popular ways people interact with augmented reality (AR) is through location-based mobile applications. By holding a phone up in their field of view, users can visualize nearby points-of-interest based on information taken from the phone's various sensors. Due to the limits of GPS, however, this type of experience is more difficult to reproduce in an indoor environment. Recently, however, Intel teamed up with AR vendors metaio to experiment with a solution to this challenge at the 2010 Intel Developer Forum (IDF).
Layar has had a busy week. The augmented reality software makers recently announced the inclusion of Skyhook Wireless' location SDK, a new local search feature called "Nearby" and a free embeddable AR viewer called "Layar Player" for iPhone apps. All the while, however, the company also showed off an experimental augmented reality technology called "sensor fusion" at Google Zeitgeist. The video below of the demo is pretty incredible, and could be beginning of a new generation of augmented reality.
Augmented reality (AR) is a fast-growing trend for mobile application developers, but few tools exist that make including the emerging technology in an app quick and easy. Many popular brands have published content on various mobile AR browsers, but it's not too surprising that they might want to include the technology in their own apps. Layar, the most widely used mobile AR browser, is looking to fulfill this need with the release of Layar Player - a few lines of code iPhone developers can use to embed full AR Layar content in their apps.
Layar, which develops mobile augmented reality browser software, has had a busy weekend with a pair of announcements for the front- and back-ends of its service. Layar allows users to see various types of geo-tagged points-of-interest (POI) - including tweets, Wikipedia articles and business listings - in a virtual perspective by holding their phone up and looking around. The Android version of its app will now leverage the Skyhook Core Engine location SDK for improved location accuracy, and the iPhone version now features a new "Nearby" feature for easier discovery of local content.
Science fiction author and Wired blogger Bruce Sterling passed along the interesting augmented reality video embedded below. It's an iPhone app from the Japanese company Sazanami called Amazing3D that lets users augment still photographs with playful 3D objects which they can then interact with. While it's not the most amazing example of augmented reality (actually it is pretty fun to play with), it did remind me that there have been several great kid-friendly AR applications developed recently. As augmented reality evolves and finds its most successful niche markets, toys, games and children could be some of the most efficient avenues to success.
Last week, The Royal Mail (the national postal service of the United Kingdom) introduced what it called an "intelligent stamp" that displays a video using augmented reality when it is scanned with a smartphone. Stamps are a heartwarming, sentimental collectors item that often memorialize historic people, things and events. This campaign - part of the Royal Mail's "Great British Railways" series - is no different. While it is certainly an interesting big-name marketing adoption of augmented reality, the experience feels lack-luster, and could have potentially been far more interesting with further development.
