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Smartphones Get "Reality Overlay" App
Michael_Curator writes to tell us that mobile phones now have a "reality overlay" app that combines a smartphone's camera, GPS, and compass to augment a user's view of a particular location with metadata. "It works as follows: Starting up the Layar application automatically activates the camera. The embedded GPS automatically knows the location of the phone and the compass determines in which direction the phone is facing. Each [commercial] partner provides a set of location coordinates with relevant information which forms a digital layer. By tapping the side of the screen the user easily switches between layers."
Think "Terminator Vision". Red hue optional.
Proud member of the American Non Sequitur Society. We might not make much sense, but boy do we love pizza!
Excellent, now the entire world is like a guided museum tour.
'And on our right here, we have the parking lot that is affectionately nicknamed 'The Hobo's Restroom'. Please watch your step.'
Integration with redemption systems to provide user value (i.e. book here now for 50% off)
Oh goody -- not only can i get great features but I can get a discount on the ones I don't already have --- THANKS!!~
"i lost my dignity on a slippery wiener"
And it's called augmented reality. Reinventing the wheel is bad for society but good for egos.
instead of simply using satellites orbiting the earth we write programs on these phones that request to be triangulated by surrounding phones in order to develop a cellular sense of location, like a layer of atmospheric nerves relaying locational awareness data constantly? then as pictures are taken the location can be stored in a database and a digital reconstruction of reality can be created. why drive a car with a camera on top when you can get humanity to do all the work for free by providing a service?!
Sure it's cool, but can anyone give me a situation where they would actually use this in real life? I'm still waiting on the basic stuff, like Flash.
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I wake up in the darkness, totally lost. I fumble for my smartphone, knowing it's the only was I'll manage to reach home before dawn.
What I see is not comforting.
"It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue."
Slashdot: news for Apple. Stuff that Apple.
And it's called augmented reality. Reinventing the wheel is bad for society but good for egos.
If it weren't for people reinventing the wheel, we wouldn't have rubber tires, tank treads, and chrome spinnaz!
I am the richest astronaut ever to win the superbowl.
All three G1 users just creamed their jeans.
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"Here are all the trees and bushes nearby big enough to pee behind"
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If I want to know what building I'm looking at, I'll read the letters on it, not some ad on my phone.
Haven't relatively mature technologies like GPS devices been providing augmented reality for some time now? I mean, my GPS can show me the location of Dunkin Donuts shops long before I can see them on the street. Integrating the GPS-located items in the camera view seems to be the only innovation here.
Sounds a lot like the tech in Vernor Vinge's Rainbow's End. Once again, the prescience of SF...
/unimpressed.
Call when they develop THIS app.
http://www.pictureshack.net/images/9846newlayar.JPG
(Yes, it's sloppy; it was a very quick photoshop.)
-Styopa
Just add face reconginiton to the camera and upload your personal profiles. Wella you now know who you jsut saw in the street
How long will it take for the National Sex Offender Registry overlay to be created? Then you can be sure your kids are safer, when your phone alerts you to a nearby sex offender. http://www.familywatchdog.us/
"We're gonna need a bigger boat"
So this wouldn't really just be another means for greedy people to control and manipulate my perception and information in such a way that it benefits them? Like having selective "points of interest" in navigation and mapping software, those inclusions only being available to those "points" willing to pony up a chunk of dough for the privilege?
This "reality overlay" is really about reality control/filtering.
Back when Google was running the first round of the Android programming challenge, a lot of excitement was generated by an augmented reality app called Enkin. To everybody's surprise, it didn't make it into the first round of finals, and seemd to disappear from sight. Turns out that Google had some other plans for them.
I did see one AR app in action on a G1, but I don't remember what it was called. The results were so-so... Hit and miss, sometimes it would get the buildings right, sometimes it wouldn't. But AR is definitely a very appealing possibility, and it'll probably improve very quickly. All the basic bits seem to be there.
For those not familiar with augmented reality a very recent Japanese anime series called Denno Coil is a good place to start.
I'm a sorcerer level 40 and I already have this ad free, oh and several hundred AutoM8s under my control..
So many injustices..so little time..
I downloaded some program for my Android phone months ago that did this. It didn't have ads either, it just pulled data from free sources (mostly wikipedia).
And you know what? It was stupid and useless then, it's stupid and useless now, and advertising in it isn't going to make it any less stupid and useless.
Also, using GPS and accelerometers in tandem to give spatially relevant information isn't remotely a new idea either. The Sky Map program for Android has been doing that too for some time. Guess what? It's pretty stupid and useless as well.
I guess all it takes to make a "killer app" is to put advertising on something stupid and useless. I already did that on my blog, I should be rich!
Porquoi?
there was a game that layered the 'real world' video with CG characters.
There was an unknown error in the submission.
I was telling people twenty or more years ago that I wanted a handheld device that I could take on the trail, hold up, look through like a little window, and see an overlay showing trail distances, climbs/descents, geographic feature names, and so forth. In 1990, you could do it as a slow, clumsy demo on a "handheld device" tethered to a room full of equipment. Now, with GPS, built-in cameras and good inertial tracking, we're really just a good eye-tracking layer away from a true implementation.
by William Gibson (author of Neuromancer,) where artists started using goggles, GPS info and 3D modeling to create an alternate reality featuring their works.
When Google StreetView can get the street numbers right, this might actually work.
For now, it's just going to be another ad delivery system.
The cool app for this would be one that, when you enter a restaurant or store, sounds an alarm if the business has a problem, like a poor Yelp rating, a poor BBB rating, a poor health department rating, etc.
Sounds like something out of Spook Country, commercialized.
Perfect! Because reality has a well-known Liberal bias.
What about if people on slashdot didnt like it? Oh, wait, then it would vibrate anytime it existed. Or at least weren't at a computer.
Smartphones Get "Reality Overlay" App
Reality overlay? Ha ... I'm guessing Steve Jobs is behind this one.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Okay, so this gadget knows where you are, and the direction you are looking trhough gps position + compass info. But does it use the AF system also to tell what you are pointing it at?... else, if distance is not available, I guess one got to differentiate the object using shape? So how does it know that the shape of a given object corresponds to a certain object/position on a map? does someone have to go and record all existing views first, or has someone managed to do some algos for mapping perpendicular top view from google maps to horizontal views of buildings?
So, how does this gadget tell what object you are looking at, if it cannot measure distance accurately? Does it use the AF info, or does it base all on shape recognition? (thus requiring a custom DB) or can it map to perpendicular data like that on google maps?
Am I the only one on here that thinks of Dennou Coil or Eden of the East (Higashi no Eden) when I read about thiss? I would love to have an augmented reality ala Dennou Coil, complete with the glasses, but Eden of the East-style identification would be fun, too.
This augmented reality is prominently featured in William Gibson's novel Spook Country. I was talking to a suit about this idea just a couple of weeks ago. He suggested that it was worthwhile pursuing. Now that they seem to have done that, I'm discouraged. Fuck, I'm always too late... :(
"All you have to do is be fragile and grateful. So stay the underdog." Chuck Palahniuk, Choke
Doesn't Yelp have a poor Yelp rating that they paid Yelp to hide?
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
... can be found here:
http://www.behance.net/Gallery/Future-of-Internet-Search-Mobile-version/59175
I really like this concept and believe it's a viable new way to interact with our environment.
Back in 2008, I had a chance to catch Intel's keynote presentation for CES. One of the first items they started out with was an augmented-reality/reality-overlay presentation, based on where they wanted to be in 5 years with the newly announced Atom. In the presentation, Intel had a smartphone-shaped device with a camera and microphone connected to a computer behind the stage. Up front they had a mock Chinese street that the presenters moved through, pointing the camera at various items. They were showcasing items such as real-time translation of signs or menus (the English text drawn about the item) and how the software was able to relate information about the mock restaurant and its menu items to reviews and general information about the dishes. They also had a quick session with an actress speaking Mandarin to show off speech recognition and translation of that.
It was probably one of the cooler things I've ever seen, even if the entire thing had been set up to go off without a hitch. The basic input hardware (cameras and mics) are already in smartphones, so it's just a matter of the processors catching up in the next however-many years it takes. I don't expect it's going to change the world, but something resembling a Star Trek Universal Translator (or a Bablefish) combined with some basic image recognition like TFA shows and some basic semantic web abilities to tie things together (largely so that it's faster to find things) would be a handy thing to have.
For those of you who read Wm Gibson's Virtual Light (1994) I'd guess we're a step closer ... :-)
If you haven't read it, the book centers around a pair of special glasses that sport "Virtual Light". The concept of VL adds optical data for the wearer. In the book, this can be whatever supplemental data you've uploaded. Load the right data, and when you look at a garden though the VL glasses, you get a little tag overlayed on each plant, telling you that plant's name and other info. Cops might see forensic data overlayed when they look at a crime scene. Or a land developer might see future, planned buildings in place of what's there now.
In the book, the macguffin was supposedly the Virtual Light glasses, but really it was the data on them and what it meant to the data owner.