It may come as a surprise to some but augmented reality and the wide world of sports go way back. Glowing hockey pucks and yellow first-down lines on the football field are just a few of the early examples, but today AR is a part of every-day sports broadcasts. More recently, however, AR has begun to make its way into the live sports experience, and an app recently developed by IBM for the U.S. Open Tennis Championships is an excellent example of this transition.
Gov 2.0 advocates have printed a run of QR (2D barcode) stickers they will stick at bus stops all over Washington DC today, allowing mobile phone users to quickly get up-to-the moment bus progress reports, post traffic status updates, and more. This augmentation of the physical world with real-time data from the ether strikes me as accessible and useful. The project was one of many ideas discussed at DCWeek this June and is being implemented by the Research and Development group in Office of the CTO, DC Government (on Twitter: OCTOLabs).
The mobile augmented reality (AR) industry has seen a tremendous amount of growth over the last year. No longer are we simply holding our phones up looking around for nearby coffee shops - now our magical pocket computers can recognize images and augment them in real-time with 3D graphics. Mobile AR browsers like junaio and Layar have begun to venture into this realm, but a new player, Popcode, has a different spin on the mobile AR interface and how we interact with objects in the real world.
Polar Rose, a Swedish-based facial recognition startup launched in summer 2007, is shutting down its consumer-facing service that allowed users to tag people in photos anywhere on the Web. Last spring, the innovative company introduced facial recognition to popular photo-sharing site Flickr by way of a third-party browser plugin. With the plugin installed, Polar Rose users could tag their Flickr photos with the names of their Facebook contacts and then alert those friends on Facebook that they had been tagged. It also organized Flickr photos into pages by person and could recognize people automatically in later uploads.
Unfortunately, this and all other end user-focused services are being terminated as the company switches its focus to its series of facial recognition products. Says Polar Rose's Thijs Stalenhoef, the service was "fun while it lasted."
You know those advertisements for fancy high-end cars that can tell you when you're getting to close to another car, or perhaps, a runaway shopping cart? Cool stuff, right? If you're like me, you probably wish you could have features like these on your run down nine-year-old Ford Escort. Well, thanks to a new iPhone app, you can come pretty close. Using augmented reality (AR) technology, imaGinyze's Augmented Driving app can enhance your heads-up driving experience with safety information and warnings.
How many times have you been driving and wondered "What's the name of that mountain?" or "Which river is this I'm crossing?" Maybe you consulted a paper map, or even your GPS, and were still uncertain. Well, that uncertainty may be a thing of the past with a new topographical augmented reality app called Marmota.
Up to now, when you thought of "augmented reality," the picture in your mind was probably urban. After all, an architectural AR app or one that tells you all about a painting is of limited utility when you're on the freeway or out on a hiking trail. That may be a matter of what's available, not what's useful.
There's a memorable scene in the movie Minority Report where a man reads a futuristic newspaper with rich embedded multimedia updating live with breaking news. While we are a long way seeing anything like this in the hands of the general public, a German newspaper has taken a small step in that direction with the release of a special augmented reality (AR) edition of its Friday magazine.
As the popularity of augmented reality (AR) marketing grows, it is becoming difficult to keep up with all of the important brands that are looking to test out the technology. This is great news for AR fans. As I've mentioned several times before, big brand acceptance of AR as a viable digital marketing platform is a huge precursor to mainstream popularity. In the recent weeks, several big brands have jumped on the AR bandwagon, and some have even gone back for seconds. Here's a run down of some recent activity.
Back in April we told you about an augmented reality (AR) developer challenge that was launched by mobile AR platform junaio that promised $5,000 to the creator of the most interesting and unique junaio content channel. Last week, a handful of judges (including myself) determined the winner from a group of finalists with a unanimous vote for archINFORM - a channel that provides architectural information about the buildings around you.
The charm of small museums is a visitor's ability to apprehend a total, if limited, picture of, say the history of dolls, or the life of the town of Brownsville. The charm of large museums is in the branching multiplicity of their offerings, the ability to enter a metropolis of knowledge. The risk in the latter environment, however, is the visitor walking out having had an Experience but without having gained much understanding.
One of the world's largest museums, the American Museum of Natural History, has introduced Explorer, an iPhone app that uses augmented reality to give its visitors more control of their experience.
