The Augmented Reality Blog

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 ;)

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.

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 :)

looking at the many AR applications today we can partition them into three major categories:

• Contextual: the user’s context (location, view direction, preferences, time) is used to augment reality
• Informational: information is added to products
• Interactive: the user is able to interact with the objects in the augmented reality space (other than just changing their positions by moving a marker).

The three major AR categories

Some examples:

Note that interaction (for instance in the BMW repair assistent’s case) can also be by means of voice commands, or by operating a phone’s touchscreen. Of course the coolest interaction is by means of gesture recognition as in SONY’s EyePet’s case.