Obviously I love augmented reality, as evidenced in previous posts. I first posted about it months ago with GE’s Ecomagination commercial on the Super Bowl, and a couple month’s later when magician, Marco Tempest, used the technology to make his slight-of-hand magic even more amazing.
Now, SPRXmobile in Amsterdam has begun exploring a practical application of this technology, as you’ll see in this demo:
Their product, Layar, is a video-mode application that works with your 3G phone and its GPS system, plus a compass and an accelerometer, also both built-in to the phone. These elements work to establish your position on the planet, which direction your phone is facing and its angle or tilt. With that information, the application is able to pull data feeds that are relevant to the environment you’re viewing through the video display.
Wonder what the reviews have been like for the restaurant you’re standing in front of? Or maybe if there are any apartments for rent in that building nearby?
All kinds of relevant data will be available, and presented in a visually appealing, 3D context relative to the environment you’re viewing through your phone’s video camera, turning that view into a detailed and highly engaging dynamic interface.
It’s kind of like they were contemplating re-inventing the wheel and instead came up with the mag-lev train.
Microsoft is dangerously close to stealing the cool factor away from Apple, not for its PC/Mac war of the ages, but because it is getting ready to shift the paradigm of the gamers’ UI experiences. What’s in the offing is Project Natal, introduced to reporters and VIPs on the eve of the E3 in Los Angeles.
Not being on the guest list, I can’t make any first hand observations, but one of the guys on our team is an avid gamer and Xbox 360 aficionado, as well as being versed in all things gaming, and he had to take a few days off to calm-down after viewing the video feed from the press conference on the Xbox Channel.
This demo and presentation is pretty crazy stuff. A lot of bloggers are disbelieving that Microsoft has really cracked the code on this, at least not to this level.
Here’s another video that shows more of the gaming experience vs. the artificial intelligence that Milo demonstrated above.
That’s enough of a difference that Wii and other gaming systems should be pretty nervous. Although Wii is much easier to master than the current Xbox, and PS3, there is virtually no learning curve with the controller-free gesturing in Natal. No “A” then flick your wrist while hitting “Trigger” style interaction here. Just do what you’d do normally if you were engaged in the activity and you’re playing. If the AI layer is anywhere close to Milo, we’re talking mag-lev trains, baby!
Say what you will about the evil empire, Microsoft is an amazing company, and their presentations at Wharton’s Business School and last week’s Techfest, Microsoft’s annual innovation fair, amplified this yet again.
There are a number of such visioning videos on their OfficeLabs web site which paint a pretty amazing view of where technology is headed in our lives. Considering this is just a 10-year snapshot, it’s going to come at us fast (as if it hasn’t been already).
Thanks, Keith, for pointing me toward the 2019 video at the top of this page!
If you have a MacIntosh, you’ve known for a while that the web can be a different kind of experience than browsing on a Windows machine, sometimes good and bad.
To the good, a year or so ago, Hal Riney & Partners introduced a web site with “gesture navigation” which allowed site visitors with web cams to wave their hand in front of the camera to move the display, left, right, up, down, etc.
GE has just taken that to a new planet with their Ecomagination site, and its “augumented reality” interface. Requiring the “solar panel marker” download to work properly, augmented reality is your image in the webcam, holding the panel, and watching it open up before your eyes, perfectly positioned against the panel image, presenting a 3D diorama from their TV commercials, for example the scarecrow from the Wizard of Oz at a wind farm. It moves and changes perspective as you move the image.
Because a lot of people may not have webcams to try this themselves, here’s a rough movie I made of the experience I had.
Very cool new dimension to take flash to, and obviously other technology offshoots on the near horizon.
I’m starting to think that the navigation side of user experience may be the most interesting area of technological innovation in the coming year….
One of the people in our office sent me a link to www.poodwaddle.com recently, specifically to their world clock.
Very interesting stuff in that it showed statistics on the population, environment, energy, crimes and other interesting perspectives on the human condition.
This caused me to check out the entire site, which is filled with interesting tools, freeware, games, mp3′s, the world clock and earth clock, and a robust search tool across all these categories and more.
The home page is customizable and the tools are pretty sweet.
Definitely, they should lose the ladybug, however….
Nothing real deep here, so you can lose the compression pants and bike helmet.
Still a pretty fun social profiling technique using only visual stimuli. I love the fact that at the end they let you grab the widget so you can post it to your Facebook or whatever page.
I’m not sure “dreamer” “thriller” “back to basics” “relaxed” is 100% on the money, but it’s not far off. Not sure how the outcome would have changed if I’d picked the dog turd picture for “that’s gross.”
My youngest son, Max, wants to be a pilot, a career which I always thought to be cool, but never wanted for myself. It’s good he’s getting into it now, because in a few years, the level of competition is going to be pretty fierce.
Gizmodo reported yesterday on a new flight SIM pitting real stunt planes and virtual planes competing with each other on the same course. The technical integration is pretty crazy due to the difficulty of exactly plotting the real planes position on the course in real time, but the experience if they pull this off will be unbelievable.
Conceived as a wide audience distributed sporting event, this would allow masses of people to tune-in, log-on and become part of the event from their living rooms.
Please understand; when I’m in the office, I’m by no means a power user.
Typically, I power it up in the morning before going to work, and the phone is “on” but on standby from that point. During the work day, I manage maybe 20 – 30 emails, and spend maybe a half-hour in one of the apps, games or on the web. I probably make only about 4 – 6 phone calls, because most calls are through the office line. I leave around 6, and by then I’m getting a “10% battery remaining” warning message, such that the phone may be dead before I get home.
That’s pretty pathetic. Apple should be embarrassed by this.
My Mac pal, Rob, tells me this is a huge issue that’s cost a bunch of Apple employees their jobs, and that the announcement they’re making next week will address this through a lighter operating system that won’t drain the battery so fast.
I would be reluctant to give up this phone because of all the amazing things it does. But I know when I’m away from the office and counting on this phone a LOT more than I do when I’m in town, I’m going to be thinking dark thoughts and could easily be swayed to a phone that has many of these features, even in a less cool wrapper, but with more reasonable (even 24 hours!!) battery life.
If you haven’t checked out the new Chrome browser, you should do so. It takes several cool features from other browsers and rolls them into a pretty smooth browsing experience.
Very light and fast, the command line serves for both browser direction and search query, which is nice compared to separate windows for each. Its menu structure is very basic – forward, back, refresh, options and tools. No separate icons for home and bookmarks, etc., etc. These types of issues are handled in options versus hogging browser real estate for options that are reset infrequently.
Stealing a page from Opera, the default home view can be set in a tabbed series of frequently visited web windows. They have also trumped IE 8 by introducing an “incognito” mode that keeps sites and files from being logged in the browser’s history or temp files, unless they are specifically downloaded.
No real downsides that I see. I can’t integrate Clipmarks yet, but that will soon be solved. On the “scary” side, when it seamlessly imported my Firefox bookmarks it also imported the stored passwords. I wasn’t quite prepared for that; convenient yes, but if I was advised the passwords were also being imported, I didn’t notice it.
I was having some trouble with the 2.x, so this is a big step into the positive for me just for that reason. Weird buggy stuff like dropping a session out of the blue, or being really slow to load when my Safari or Opera were loading normally. I even stripped and reloaded it a couple of times over several months, and still had issues.
So far 3.0 is a peach. Fast, slightly streamlined, better marking/tagging, and so far it hasn’t puked mid-session even once. No problem adding stumble and clipmarks, either.
And it seamlessly picked up all my bookmarks, passwords, etc. even though I’d uninstalled its 2.x predecessor. What does that say about XP’s “delete software”???
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