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.

The NY Times magazine explains augmented reality together with some of the examples-du-jour such as the action figures for Avatar and the Burger King dollar menu.

The virtual “book” “Daar ben ik” (dutch for “here I am”) wants to draw attention to the impact climate change is having today on the daily lives of people in developing countries, surfing the hype wave AR is currently on.

It’s got a nicely designed web site and the AR part works very well. They could have just published the movie on youtube, but this way the viewer feels more engaged.

And yes, you need to cut trees to produce the paper on which we can print our markers, but it’s for a good cause here so let’s give them a break ;)

The Mercedes AR campaign has been in the news a while ago, but it was noteworthy anyway in being my first AR marker that came by the mail.

Enter the virtual store url, activate your webcam, and show your entrance ticket.

Next step could be to add some personalisation to the mix, after all they are sending a personal invitation.

Patti Maes from MIT showcases her ongoing research, veeeery promising indeed:

Here’s the Ray Ban AR app “Virtual Mirror” from last year:

And here’s the Glasses Direct AR app from this year:

They are pretty similar (they’re actually the same :) ) and may very well be starting a larger trend of “virtual product sampling”: try shoes, pants, glasses, hats, bags etc. No more unrepresentative quircky 3D models in flash, just wear them virtually first.

I expect Amazon and other big retail companies to adopt this kind of virtual sampling soon.

Configuring these kind of AR apps can be a bit tedious, but it’s a promising start.

Over at his PersonalizeMedia blog, Gary Hayes shows us a list of business models with a potential commercial value  and expected popularity. It clearly points out that we’re only at the beginning of the endless range of possibilities Augmented Reality will offer.

Check it out here.

The Dutch website ‘Beste Product’ (a website that reviews products to help consumers pick the best ones), has published a funny video. While reviewing the new Samsung Galaxy phone, they showcase what you can do with Layar. One of the applications on Layar is spotting the homes of famous Dutch people. And that is what they do. They go on the streets of Amsterdam and find homes of famous people. Apparently they stumble upon the house of Brad Pitt and guess what, Brad Pitt is home ;-). Of course it is not Brad, but a look-a-like. And Brad, as far as I know, is not Dutch. But anyway. The video is in Dutch, scroll to 2:40 for the excitement :-)

That’s maybe fun, but it poses a huge ethical question of course. Can we do that? And do we want this to happen? But before we start to blame AR for this, Layar is just overlaying reality with a database of addresses of famous people. The question really is, who is offering such databases? And can they do that?

Now this is a good idea.

There used to be a time  you knew where the nearest mailbox was. Now that sending a real letter is something rare, you have no clue anymore (well, I don’t).

TNT created an AR app on Layar to solve that problem. Wave with your android phone and it will show you where the nearest mailbox is.

A lot of people are listing up their top AR applications. Here is a cool top 6 of 20fourlabs. We are showing number 1-3. The others you can watch here.

1. TwittARound

Point your phone in a direction and it will show you the tweets

2. Layar

Enough said about this one. They are all over the place.

3. Nearest Tube

If you live in London, this is your app. It shows you the nearest tube station.