Metaverse One

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.

A few months back a friend told me of a 3D city map app called UpNext . Naturally being a digital city geek I downloaded the app for my iPod Touch to give it a quick look-see. Launching the app gave me the choice of several 3D city maps (Austin, Boston, New York, Portland, San Francisco, and Washington D.C.) to download that I could access offline which is a super plus for those with an iPod Touch. I selected San Francisco, which only took a few moments to download, and it didn't take long to become impressed with the app. Navigation uses standard Apple interface actions such as pinch to zoom, two finger drag to tilt the view, etc. As I zoomed in from the initial bird's eye view of the whole city, the app broke the city down into its neighborhoods. This was a nice surprise as I still don't know the exact locations of all the 'hoods' in SF. Zooming further down quickly loaded simple but nicely textured 3D building models with more levels of detail as I got closer to ...