The Augmented Reality Blog

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’.

Mattel is taking Augmented Reality to their game Avatar (based on the movie).

This is great, because it will give us insights on possibilities to interact with tags. It will educate a number of people to work with tags and cards to interact with a computer system. And it bridges the off-line / online divide.

Hopefully this will -in the long run- also drive improvements in performance, and improvements in tag recognition.

This is an important step.

More demoes on Avataritag
More on Crunch Gear.