The Augmented Reality Blog

And it has one. Robots taking you to meeting room, a huge augmented reality scenery and an even bigger interactive wall. Wow.

In France, the 12th International Conference on Virtual Reality has taken off. If you don’t know the conference, please take a look at the video below. The conference shows projects we know already (the Mini case, the whole world knows by now), but mostly focuses on virtual ideas so far off that it will take ages before we will see them on the market place. It’s the place to go to if you want to take a peak into the future of virtual and augmented reality.

One of the products that we haven’t heard of before and that is ready to market is the holocubtile (only French can come up with names like this ;-) ). It is a complete multitouch box that allows people to manipulate a projected 3-D object by sliding their hands across different sides of the cube. If you have no idea what I’m talking about, please check out the video of France 2.

At Where 2.0 Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman talks about the company’s launch of Monocle, an augmented-reality application for the iPhone that enables users to combine Yelp reviews (on restaurants, clubs, shops, …) with the physical world. He talks about how they put Monocle in their mobile app as an easter egg, not expecting much of it. The surprising results was a sustained 40-50% increase in mobile traffic.

Adidas announces (via Wired) a line of shoes that will contain AR markers in their tongues such that when you hold your shoe for a webcam a virtual world. Nice gimmick, but I wonder if you’d do this more than once.

The more interesting part is that they couple this with some games they will announce in which the shoe (the marker) is used to play the game.

It would even be more interesting if it augmented my product experience, for example if the marker helped determine the percentage tear and wear of the shoe: ‘it seems you have made good use of your shoes, better get yourselves some new ones right away’.

Brightkite announces to add location-based adds to their layer in Layar (via readwriteweb). It seems to be quite rudimentary right now, but if they can be selective and make the ads relevant to the things you’re looking for, it may even have some advantages. Wouldn’t that be something that the publishers of Layar would want to do themselves ?

Before today, Augmented Reality (AR) applications were reserved for iPhone 3gs and Android users. Now, with the Symbian version of Wikitude, also Nokia N97 and Nokia N97 mini owners can use their mobile phone camera as an Augmented Reality Browser. The application surface has been adapted for Nokia and existing control elements have been integrated to increase the user experience for Nokia customers.

If you don’t know Wikitude, here is a movie on the Android version:

Don’t they say if Google enters a market, that market has to have a huge potential?
So welcome Google into AR with this Google Goggles app. Only on Android for the moment. Google calls it “visual search” and here is a bit of explanation…

And here is the Google demo:

Next to Coke and McDonalds, Stella Artois decided to jump onto the AR bandwagon too.

In the US, it will ship “Le Bar Guide”: an iPhone app that offers US lager drinkers an augmented reality app that helps them find the nearest Stella-dealing pub or bar. The database is 80.000 bars strong. Btw, it is not only bars in the US. It’s bars all over the world. It even has the phone number of the local cab company if things get a bit blurry. The app is developed by AcrossAir.

Its second augmented reality initiative is published on stellaartois.com. The Christmas “Send a Card, Save a Tree” campaign lets consumers send a free, branded, beer-themed augmented reality Christmas eCard. For every card send, Stella will ensure that one tree is saved. The goal is to help protect an endangered South American rainforest by saving 1 million trees.

Well done Stella!

The movie Avatar inspired some big advertisers to give Augmented Reality a try. It makes sense to go AR if you are sponsoring a movie in which a person’s avatar lives in a virtual world.

Coca Cola enables 140 million bottle-shaped cans, some 30 million fridge packs, bags, bottles and drink cups to show a controllable helicopter if you put them in front of your webcam.

Here is the ad that announces the AR coup:

You can try the real thing as of the launch of the movie. December 18th that is.

McDonalds is also getting into the game. It’ll have special cards that bring up a controllable mechanical toy when you hold it up to your Webcam and visit an Avatar-branded site. More details are not yet revealed.

And of course we also have the AR enabled Avatar cards, but this one you must have seen already.

If you visit the online clothier Tobi.com, you can go to its online dressing room and try your selection out. If you are not sure about the dress or the shirt, push the button to take a picture and share it on Facebook to get instant feedback from your friends.

Augmented Reality, motion capture and social networking all working together to help you shop.

This is just another example of how augmented reality is taking over a part of the online shopping process. Agree, it’s not perfect yet put we are getting there. The value that AR can bring to the process is obvious. We only have to wait for the technology to catch up.

But the real question is if this will drive more sales. That’s a difficult one. People do like to feel and touch the item before they decide to buy it. But then again, all the catalog shoppers will tell you otherwise.

Anyways, if you want to see how it works, here is the movie.