The Augmented Reality Blog » interactive

Santander, the Spanish financial group, wanted to have a visitor center no visitor ever saw before.

wim — Fri, 09 Apr 2010 18:51:06 +0000

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

Sixth Sense: Real Augmented Reality

patrice — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 19:07:20 +0000

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

glasses direct following Ray Ban’s steps

patrice — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 19:27:29 +0000

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.

Mattel goes AR

patrice — Sat, 03 Oct 2009 16:29:29 +0000

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.

BMW Z3 paint brush AR app

patrice — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 14:43:24 +0000

A very slick AR application.

Unfortunately you need to install software (yikes). But fortunately there’s a youtube sample video :)

Note the interesting sharing feature:

paint:
save:
share it on facebook or youtube:

Nice. Even nicer is doing it in the real world!

KIA makes an interactive AR app for the new Ceed

patrice — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 19:29:06 +0000

I like the apps that are more than merely objects on markers. Especially if they make you discover and interact.

That’s exactly what KIA did with it’s Cee’d AR app.

Cee'd application screenshot

The plot:

print four ‘magic’ markers (which illustrate the position of a manual gear stick).
keep two cards at a time in front of your camera
discover a feature of the car

The funny thing is they don’t tell you up front which card combination will result in which car feature being shown.

There’s a combination which shows you a rear-viewing mirror in which you can see yourself :) and a steering wheel which you can turn (by moving the cards).

This is indeed fun, interactive way of discovering the car.

viewing a panoramic foto

patrice — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 22:05:51 +0000

Simple ideas are often cool: place a marker on your forehead (okay that’s not really cool ;D ), then look at a panoramic photo. Move your head to move the part of the panoramic picture you’re looking at.
That’s what they did over at tarotaro.org

Coolest Remote Control

patrice — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 18:39:47 +0000

CRISTAL is positioned as an alternative to the many remote controls we have in our living room. But that doesn’t do any justice to the really coolness of this application of (highly interactive and informational) AR. Watch this video:

Some argue that it will take a long time before this technology will break through due to the fact that infrared is the current standard communication technology for remote controls and the devices they control. That will not be an issue for very long, though, since devices at home are increasingly inter-connected through home networks. TVs, laptops, computers, iPods, mobile phones already often have WiFi built-in. The only thing we’ll need to be worried about is viruses :)