Metaverse One

Reality became augmented this week in Silicon Valley at the Santa Clara Convention Center. The third annual Augmented Reality Event, aka A.R.E.2012, brought the best and brightest around the world to the Bay area for a two day conference. Companies, research institutes, artists, and more once again got a chance to show off and experience the latest in computer vision, head & eye displays, motion sensor, mobile, and related augmented reality technologies. " ARE is where the people working on and using Augmented Reality technologies come together to explore best practices and innovations in software development, tools, business strategies, design and marketing. Developers, technologists, marketers, hardware manufacturers, mobile operators, researchers, designers, startups, business developers, and entrepreneurs gather to share their experiences and learn from their peers" - website Event organizer Ori Inbar (CEO Ogmento) interviewed by ARnewsTV before the event. A...

In Dallas this past March was the first ever augmented reality event in Texas. Scheduled over two days, the event looked to help Texas augmented reality enthusiasts understand the latest in AR technology and the current state of the industry. The purpose of the Friday March 16 workshop was to introduce AR to decision makers and owners of digital content, including 3D models and geospatial data, explaining the business cases and the new ways their assets can be utilized and visualized in real time. The purpose of the Saturday March 17 workshop was to share with developers how they can use the latest tools and techniques for developing high quality AR "experiences" for their audiences. It was a great event with a rather intimate turnout at Cohabitat , a co-working developer space in the Uptown area of Dallas. Many thanks to Christine Perey, of  Perey Research & Consulting  and founder/chair of the International AR Standards Community, who helped organize the e...

I just received in the mail my Sony Ericsson Xperia Play smartphone. This is the first PlayStation certified Android smartphone, hence it is also known as the PlayStation phone. The phone has a slide-out game pad, sports the Qualcomm Scorpion processor clocked at 1GHz (which runs alongside the on-board Adreno GPU and 380MB RAM), has a 4 inch backlit LCD screen with a resolution of 480x854, a 5.1-megapixel camera with auto focus and flash, and runs the Android OS Gingerbread. I won the phone from a party Qualcomm had during the Game Developers Conference 2011 for their new Snapdragon platform . I haven't won anything like this before so I decided to make my first unboxing video. Yeah unboxing videos are silly, so I decided to spruce mine up with a little bit of augmented reality. I need a couple days to test drive this thing for a proper review. Stay tuned and thanks Qualcomm!

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This past summer in New York I got the opportunity to meet up and interview Ori Inbar , CEO and cofounder of Ogmento , an augmented reality gaming company. I would easily say that Ogmento is a leader in the commercial AR gaming space and Ori is one of the industry's key players. He is a founder/author at Gamesalfresco , a leading blog on augmented reality, one of the organizers of the Augmented Reality Event , and heads the Augmented Reality New York (ARNY) meetup group. His company Ogmento , with a development team in New York and a creative studio located in Los Angeles, has raised $3.5 million dollars in a first round of institutional funding from Chart Venture Partners and other private investors. Part 1- Part 2- Here is a promotional Augmented Reality (AR) app by Ogmento developed to promote the iPhone launch by Orange Telecom Israel. Put A Spell, the world's first augmented reality learning game for the iPhone. Many thanks to Ori for such an informative and fun i...

As part of a presentation I have next week that focuses on mixed reality, I built an augmented reality application for viewing various 3D CAD models. For the time allotted to this project I kept it simple and sweet. I decided to use a traditional marker here as the scene had too much visual noise for image recognition with all the foot and car traffic. Markers on my iPod Touch load different levels of detail 3D models of this one building. Clicking on the model binds it to a viewpoint so the marker is no longer needed. The example in the video is built on a 'mixed reality' framework that allows interactive models to be accessed by virtual and augmented reality applications. I will be sharing more of my work, application examples, and videos about this framework in the coming months.