Augmented Reality Glasses : Vuzix 920AR

A Video Eyewear and personal display devices for the mobile video manufacture company Vuzix will launch a augmented reality head mounted display called Vuzix Wrap 920AR in 6months.
The Wrap 920AR has a camera that can capture video a 752 x 480 resolution at 60fps, and combine it with a 1504 x 480 stereoscopic 3D image.

5 Best Things Vs 5 Worst Things About the iPad

5 Best Things
1. Price
2. Unlocked 3G
3. External Keyboard
4. iWork: Keynote for presentations, Numbers for spreadsheets, and Pages for word processing
5. Supports eBooks in a standard format (ePub)

5 Worst Things
1. No built-in GPS
2. No built-in USB port
3. No built-in camera
4. No wide-screen display
5. TV out has a max of only 480p

Augmented (hyper) Reality: Domestic Robocop

It is a short film by Keiichi Matsuda, a Masters student at the Bartlett School of Architecture in the United Kingdom.
This video shows how your life will be in the future with augmented reality environment.

Can the iPad Stimulate The Mobile Augmented Reality Market?

There are so many rumours that Apple will launch a new tablet computer later today (27 Jan 2010) at the press conference from its base in San Francisco, California.

Many experts expect that iPad will change the whole paradigm for the media market, including newspapers, books and magazines.

One of the lasting effects of the iPod is that it has made people to start to pay for audio files and video files which they would previously download without paying from a P2P site.

How about the mobile augmented reality market? The mobile augmented reality market has significantly increased since the iPhone 3GS and the Android platform phone appeared. However, there are still big limitations to using augmented reality on a mobile phone. One of the limitations is a mobile phone's processing capability. Current mobile augmented reality applications mostly superimpose POI (Point Of Interest). This is because if you want to superimpose line or polygon objects, you would need a more advanced computer graphic program.

In this sense, the iPad could be a good device to overcome this problem. But even so, there are still many hurdles to be overcome to develop mobile augmented reality. Complicated and advanced computer graphic algorithms will need a high-performance processor. In addition, an iTablet would need a 3G connection so it can use databases when it is located in a remote place. I believe that iTablet will bring more dynamic mobile augmented reality applications to your hands.

Early Augmented Reality Applications

Augmented Reality (AR) has been a widely-known concept since last year. Actually however, AR has been around for over four decades.
It would be worth it to look back on the major AR applications of the last few decades.
This posting is about AR applications that predate the iPhone and Android platforms.
The first augmented reality application was invented by Ivan Sutherland in 1968. He called it "Ultimate display" and he believed that the ultimate display might let us understand our own natural world better. It is basically a Head-Mounted Display (HMD) AR application.

The second major augmented reality application was made by Boeing. In addition, Tom Caudell started to use the word "Augmented reality". The flight simulation is one of the fields that has used augmented reality actively so far.

ARToolKit is the third major AR application. It was originally developted by Dr. Hirokazu Kato, and its ongoing development is being supported by the Human Interface Technology Laboratory (HIT Lab) at the University of Washington, HIT Lab NZ at the University of Canterbury, New Zealand, and ARToolworks, Inc, Seattle.

ARTag is also another tag-based AR application like ARToolKit. The good thing about this application is that you can avoid one of the main problems that many programmers face: the array problem in matching the locations of real objects and virtual objects. ARTag came out many years after the original ARToolkit, and they improved the tag detection capabilities compared with ARToolkit.

References :
http://econsultancy.com/blog/5293-augmented-reality-ar-the-technology-is-now-market-ready
http://www.hitl.washington.edu/artoolkit/
http://www.artag.net/rev1.html

Have you ever played a rock-paper-scissors game with your T-shirts?

Here is an interesting video clip showing one use for augmented reality. Augmented reality has become more and more intelligent. It is not only showing virtual objects but also it can communicate between virtual objects and humans. I think this could be the future of augmented reality.
We could improve this application by making it more realistic. In the real world of course we play face-to-face. One improvement could be for one player to wear the T-shirt while the second player wears the augmented reality goggles and plays against the first player's T-shirt.

Extend your visibility – Transparent wall

Here is a good example of how augmented reality can extend your visibility. This video clip is from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and it shows how we can use augmented reality not only for entertainment but also to save lives.

Using sensors has been a common way to extend visibility, but this is the most human sense friendly way to do that. Just watch the video and you will understand what I am talking about.

A new interface for next generation computing.

An interface and the interaction between human and machine have become big issues since the release of the iPhone, a mobile phone that has had a huge impact in the market. I believe that one of the reasons that the iPhone has been enjoying huge success is its new interface. This new interface is called "touch," or "haptic," and it was not very common before. Before the introduction of the iPhone, inputting commands through a touch interface was only possible on a simple bank machine. High-tech touch interfaces were only something we saw in movies like "The Minority Report." But now the iPhone has made such interfaces quite common in hand-held devices.
Since the implementation of next generation computing (also known as the ubiquitous environment or pervasive computing), we have seen that two issues have become very hot topics; namely new interfaces and the interaction between human and machines.
Here is an interesting video clip that shows a new interface and a new way of interacting between human and machine.
David Merrill from MIT presents a technology called Siftables at the TED conference.