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Augmenting Reality With Your Mobile Phone
blackbearnh writes "With the release of the 3.1 iPhone OS, application developers will finally be able to develop augmented reality (AR) apps. In other words, Terminator Vision is right around the corner. O'Reilly Media recently talked to Chetan Damani, one of the founders of Acrossair, about how they developed their new AR application, Nearest Tube, which displays the closest London Tube stations over a live video overlay on an iPhone 3GS. According to Damani, developing AR applications on the 3GS is dead easy, and the real trick will be developing good augmented reality apps. 'It's all about who's going to have the most amount of data and the most valid data. So there's the obvious types of apps which you're going to launch and those are the find me my nearest bar, find me my nearest event, find me the nearest tube stop, find me the nearest ATM. And those sorts of apps are all going to be around. But they're only going to be useful for when you're trying to look for things. So if we want to get users to use augmented reality a little bit more, we have to start introducing other bits of functionality, things like show me the offers available in a particular high street. Show me when I'm walking down a high street if there's a table available at a particular restaurant. And it's that sort of interactivity and providing that real-time data in this augmented reality view which is going to start getting people to use it a lot more rather than just for show me where the nearest area is.'"
Great! Just what we need! More ways people can walk around staring at a device in their hands while being utterly oblivious to their surroundings. And yet this is all about informing them of their surroundings. Oh, the irony...
This guy's the limit!
Actually, Slashdot is on the verge of releasing their own augmented-reality iPhone app.
It will use the camera to visually assess the person you're talking to. Using various AI and fuzzy-logic techniques, it will assess the things the person most likely feels self-conscious about that day.
It will then use the 3g to access a database of previous slashdot comments, and suggest 10 appropriately snarky things to say.
Now iphones will have the same crappy apps android phones have had for months. totally worth the front page.
http://layar.com/press-release-layar-reality-browser-announces-global-launch-and-new-features-in-the-latest-release/
It seems that Android already got something from the next generation of AR applications (multi-topic, interactive). They hope to port it to iPhone soon. It looks to be considerably more advanced compared to what is given in original story.
I just whip out my phone and BAM! There's the nearest drug dealer. BAM! There's the nearest hooker! BAM! There's the cops, with a red outline so you know they are baddies. I think I could get used to this...
Do not argue with an idiot. He will drag you down to his level and beat you with experience.
It will then use the 3g to access a database of previous slashdot comments, and suggest 10 appropriately snarky things to say.
I'd be happy if it would just keep track of their (personally tailored) karma status. If a Jehova's Witness shows up at my door and my head's-up display says DFTT, it would save me about an hour a month. (Not that I don't enjoy feeding the trolls, it's just not productive).
Additionally, if I'm looking at some building/statue/whatever and somebody walks up with a comment that I interpret as 50% BS/50% Insightful and has 'Super-kadooper-excellent-karma' floating above his head, I may actually listen to what he has to say.
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
Frankly could we stop with this stupid "Terminator Vision" meme? I understand it's an easy simile to make for the masses but until we have our phone chips embedded in the brain, just looking at the stuff makes it clear as day that it's nowhere near as advanced as it sounds, it's just a stupid way to advertise the stuff...
I plan to write an app that shows you guard positions in a prison - then I simply send out cakes with iPhones baked in to inmates across the land, and wait for the $999 purchases to start rolling in.
It brings Jailbreaking to a whole new level!
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Oh, and I need it for a BLACKBERRY, fuckers.
What Apple and the new iPhone lets you do is to augmented reality what jumping from a high place is to flying.
Apple still completely locks access to the video. So basically, it allows you to display something over the video, yay! But there is absoolutely no tracking possible, the information most of those AR applications use tends to mostly be limited to compass or GPS. The nearest subway application fore example just uses GPS and gyroscope information to print an arrow over your video, but it is as much AR as what the google maps application already provided. The video is just a ice animated background, but provides zero information, the application works EXACTLY the same way with your finger on the camera lens.
More interesting tracking or "Terminator Vision" would require Apple to allow you to actually access the video data for any kind of post-processing treatment to occur, which they're still blocking so far. So if you want to see some augmented reality, i'd watch towards Android rather than Apple, whose SDK and appstore policies are starting to become more than a little tiresome.
SiGNS.
Apple announced that they have patented a fully integrated Augmented Reality device for 2009, SiGNS.
"SiGNS will revolutionize the way we live by displaying pertinent information to the use about a local area." claims technological wizzkids at Apple.
SiGNS can be made from almost anything, opening potential for new and old businesses. Apple claims that creative individuals will be able to make their own SiGNS for free to advertise their own services, or to simple shout out to the world.
Need money for drugs or hookers? A SiGN can tell the world.
Businesses will be able to directly advertise to people in the local area. Users can see if stores are offering sales, look at local restaurants, even find bathrooms, tube stations, or police and medical help.
SiGNS can easily be made multilingual. In fact, some signs can be made in such a way to be universal among users.
"We think SiGNS are going to change your life"
Show me which of these girls in skirts isn't wearing underwear.
Then, show me where to hide so I can take pics with my iPhone.
"I don't have to think. I only have to do it. The results are always perfect, but that's old news." - Meat Puppets
http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/08/11/1442239
You're EDITORS! So start EDITING!
We always knew Comcast was corrupt, here's the proof: http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1909890&cid=34545432
People on phones are bad enough, but I've noticed that a significant fraction of young kids, mostly boys, seem to have zero situational awareness outside of a wedge about 90 degrees wide in front of them.
I notice this because I have horses. Parents are always bringing kids to horse barns. Usually, the girls are interested in the horses, and the boys would rather be playing a video game. Some have portable games with them. In a busy, working stable, there are people leading and riding horses all over the place. Occasionally there's a loose horse (not a big deal; they'll head for their friends or food). Some awareness of large, moving, three quarter ton animals is needed to survive, or at least not to tie up traffic. I've had kids not notice when a horse came up behind them, clicking steel shoes on cement. I've seen horses, being careful of the kids, trying to get them to move out of the way. Some kids don't notice a horse breathing down their neck, literally. (To a horse, breathing down your neck is a polite hello. A nudge with the nose from behind is a demand for attention comparable to yelling at someone. People who still don't get it will usually be shouldered aside if the horse really wants to get through.)
How will these kids ever survive a bad neighborhood or heavy traffic? Will they need a heads-up display with a tail warning system, like fighter aircraft?
You can't have non-trivial mobile video tracking in java - I mean anything more than unstable tracking of single rectangle. Android native code kit - NDK have some promise, but camera class access still not officially supported in NDK. As I understand you can still use it, unofficially, but you can have unofficial access to camera API in iPhone as well.
Imagine all the possibilities for hacking this AR system can provide!! How about sending everyone in the area to the same restaurant by showing them empty seats ? How about sending people in the wrong buses ?what about leading people to a dark corner of the street so they can be mugged ? The security questions that this can raise are enormous !