Weekly Linkfest

Slow week, or am I at fault for not paying attention to the augmentosphere?

This week’s video is without a doubt this one from The Heavy Projects – I never got so many retweets as I did after tweeting about it (if you don’t follow me I’m @augmented). Harnessing the power of Junaio, the billboards of Times Square are repainted with original street art. I think the guys from Artvertiser had this idea first, but it’s pretty neat to see it actually implemented. I just wonder whether it’s ok with Junaio’s terms of use.

Have a great week!

Weekly Linkfest Plus

I think that’s one of the best linkfests in a while. Judge for yourself:

Since Friday was Canada Day, and tomorrow is the 4th of July, let us celebrate with a double feature in this week’s video. Two first person shooter games caught my eye this week, the first ShootAR has a surprisingly sleek teaser video, while the other Uwar seems a little bit more feasible, and features cool shirts (well, cool is in the eye of the beholder). Is this new generation of AR games going to heat things up?

Have an excellent week!

Georgia Tech’s Spring 2011 Crop of Games – Nerds, Puppies and Asteroids

It was only five months ago when we reported about the first set of mobile augmented reality games coming out of Qualcomm Augmented Reality Game Studio. The studio, a partnership between Qualcomm and Georgia Tech’s Augmented Environments Lab, gives students the tools to create AR games and gives us a peek their crazy ideas. Now, a new crop of games is out of the studio’s doors, and here are my favorites:

Dodger Dodger is a simple game where you are tasked with escaping falling asteroids. This game smartly harnesses the mobile platform to add another dimension to the game. Not only does the player needs to move left and right, he also needs to move the phone back and forth in order to avoid the asteroids:

Nerdherder is obviously the bastard step child of last semaster’s Nerdferno. Instead of dodging asteroids, you need to avoid eye contact with girls in this one:

The goal of Puppy Plus is to teach your child basic math skills using a cute puppy living on a deserted island, surrounded by pirate ships. It makes perfect sense, trust me:

You can read more about these games and others coming out this spring on Qualcomm AR game studio site; Don’t miss the narwal safe sex guide.

Weekly Augmented Reality Linkfest

Wow, what a busy week. I’ve listed below only a few of this week’s AR related news stories, just to protect you from an information overload. I hope to blog about the other stories in the coming days.

This week’s video is magnificent in its simplicity. Nothing more than a demo of Qualcomm’s AR platform, featuring virtual domino bricks, it made me think what would happen if they’ll scale this game. Anyone in the world could place bricks, and anyone could push a brick and start a world-wide chain reaction, but of the playful kind. A simple game that will cross borders and cultures, or maybe I’m a walking cliche?

Have a beautiful week!

Weekly Belated Linkfest

Sorry for not posting the weekly linkfest yesterday; Don’t worry though, the links are still fresh:

I love videos done by students to show off their work. This week we are lucky to have Predator, a very impressive video (though I haven’t tried it myself) tracking algorithm resulting from Zdenek Kalal’s phd thesis at the University of Surrey, UK. You can try it yourself by downloading a compiled application to your pc, and read more about it here. Though desktop bound right now, Kalal claims that “implementation for mobile devices is feasible”.

have a great week!

Weekly Augmented Reality Linkfest

As always, here the augmented reality news stories and tidbits, I didn’t have the time (or will) to cover this week:

This week’s video is a neat meshup between the insanely successful indie computer game Minecraft and augmented reality, by one Scott Kronick (or at least I think that is his name). Kronick, an artist by trade, came to the realization that it would be great “to hack away at and modify your city or school made of cubes”. The result is “RealCraft”:

Have a nice week!

Qualcomm Announces Winners of the 2010 Augmented Reality Developer Challenge

Qualcomm Announces Winners of the 2010 Augmented Reality Developer Challenge

SAN DIEGO – February 15, 2011 – Qualcomm Incorporated (NASDAQ: QCOM) today announced the winners of its 2010 Augmented Reality (AR) Developer Challenge. The top prize of $125,000 was awarded to a team of two developers from Lithuania, Paulius Liekis and Arminas Didžiokas for Paparazzi. Second prize of $50,000 was awarded to Defiant Development Pty Ltd. for Inch High Stunt Guy. Third prize of $25,000 was awarded to five graduate students at the University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts for their submission, Danger Copter. The Challenge, which kicked off with the public availability of Qualcomm’s AR software development kit (SDK) in October 2010, encouraged developers to create a new generation of vision-based AR applications, including innovative games, educational applications and interactive marketing concepts.

“Qualcomm congratulates the winners and all the developers that provided submissions,” said Jay Wright, director of business development at Qualcomm. “With just over three months of development time since the SDK became available, developers have shown that compelling AR experiences can be created rapidly using Qualcomm’s platform.”

Winning Applications

1st Place – $125,000 – Paparazzi by Paulius Liekis and Arminas Didžiokas (Lithuania)

An interactive game where the player becomes a virtual paparazzo and sneaks pictures of a vain celebrity before he gets agitated and attacks the photographer

2nd Place – $50,000 – Inch High Stunt Guy by Defiant Development Pty Ltd. (Australia)

A game where the player arranges various obstacles to enable a stuntman to successfully jump his motorcycle through a hoop

3rd Place – $25,000 – Danger Copter by Alex Beachum, Jonghwa Kim, Jason Mathias, Kedar Reddy and Evan Sforza (USA)

A gaming adventure where the player becomes a helicopter pilot who maneuvers a water-spouting chopper to extinguish fires and rescue people from danger

The judges for the Challenge were a mix of individuals from industry and academia. Entries were judged based on creative concept, technical execution, overall user experience and other factors.

Publically available since October 2010, Qualcomm’s AR platform uses computer vision technology to align graphics tightly with underlying objects in the real world. The approach is an evolution from current AR techniques that use a device’s GPS and compass for mapping applications. Vision-based AR delivers a fundamentally different user experience in which graphics appear as if they are anchored to real world objects.

Select video clips of applications submitted to the Challenge can be viewed at www.qualcomm.com/ar. To create your own application, visit Qualcomm’s AR developer portal at developer.qualcomm.com/ar.

 

Valentine’s Weekly Linkfest

You can’t find a date using augmented reality yet (?), but you can sure do other things with it:

This week’s video is a must see. Being in German, I can’t tell you much about it, but it seems to be a concept design for in car head up display done as a university assignment. It looks very realistic and compelling – I can’t wait to have such a display in my car:

Have an excellent week!

2010 Qualcomm Augmented Reality Developer Challenge

The results for the 2010 Qualcomm AR Developer Challenge are coming next week on February 15th.  Qualcomm released this teaser video today:

Developers from around the world participated in Qualcomm’s 2010 Augmented Reality (AR) Developer Challenge and created rich AR experiences including interactive games, educational applications, and marketing concepts. These apps use Qualcomm’s AR platform, which includes the AR SDK for Android and the AR Extension for Unity.

Weekly Linkfest

It’s Sunday, and here are some links from around the augmented sphere:

Ever played Duplo (the big blocks version of Lego) as a toddler? Worried that your kids will only want to play with things that have touch screens on them? Worry not, legoplatformer.com will turn your old bricks into a mobile augmented reality platform capable of running computer games. On a serious note, that’s one example of the power of Qualcomm’s AR SDK: