Metaverse One

Over the past few years I have been engaging a lot more with various entities in Denmark. One such group that has recently caught my attention is the Danish library system. Now I do remember coming across this report years back about the city of Aarhus Main Library's Transformation Lab and being impressed. Recently Dave Arendash, CTO at SpiralConcepts, and I were invited to present at SimLibrary, an event highlighting mixed reality technologies for libraries, held in Odense, Denmark. From the SimLibrary Website (translated from Danish):  SimLibrary is a cooperation between Odense Central Library, Aalborg, and Herning libraries with Euman A / S, and Educational Media Centers in the project cities. The SimLibrary project aims to develop libraries to a prominent place in the digital experience community with young people as drivers in a user-driven innovation process. To create virtual and physical environments that encourage young people to form relationships. ...

Last night during a WWDC party I got a first hand look at Sphero  and one of its augmented reality applications. Sphero, made by Colorado based Orbotix, is a little plastic LED-lit orb that can be controlled using a number of smart phone applications. Users can control this $129 dollar 'smart toy' either via a phone's touchscreen or with gestures, using the handset's accelerometer. Although there are not many applications for Sphero yet, a little less than a dozen, more will be released over the next month  (thanks Chuck) . I can quickly imagine a variety of fun uses for such a toy. It is currently only available on iOS with Android coming soon. Seems I now have a new thing I need to hack on.

Charting unknown territory is definitely nothing new for the Danes. Danish companies such as Vestas , Lego , and Unity3D are conquering their industries in a way that would make their viking ancestors proud. Now entering this group is Playingmondo , a platform for creating and interacting with location based experiences. For those not familiar with location-based services , the Playingmondo app, available for iPhone and Android, uses the built-in GPS in the mobile phones to allow users to interact with digital content created around real world locations. This content can be viewed in a variety of ways including augmented reality. Already there are numerous Playingmondo playgrounds all over Denmark and in other countries, and even though a majority of the experiences are games, there are also experiences focused on health, education, tourism, and cultural heritage. The Playingmondo website is where you can join a community to find virtual playgrounds near you, meet up with your team m...