WEAVE is a new German magazine for designers,developers and companies using interactive media. It reports on important trends, actual projects and interesting technologies.
Basing on case studies WEAVE investigates conceptional and technological aspects of real projects.
A workshop section provides step-by-step instructions and gives advices regarding tools, workflows, usability and many more.
Bionic Eye is a new application specifically developed for the iPhone 3GS that enables you to visualize Points of Interest (POI) located in your nearby environment in the US, thanks to a unique Augmented Reality functionality using the iPhone camera.
POI databases include restaurants, WiFi hotspots, subway stations (New York Subway, Washington Metro, Chicago L Rapid Transit), etc. Over 100.000 POI are already included in this application. Elements located at a distance less than 1km (0,621miles) only will be displayed on the screen.
Our new project has been revealed today, we are very proud to announce a new Augmented Reality game called Firefighter 360 for the iPhone 3GS.
We actually used our Augmented Reality engine developed for Bionic Eye application to create this little game.
In this life-saving fire-person shooter, you play as a firefighter, rather than gunning down enemies, you will have to douse virtual flames spreading very fast in your real environment. As you physically turn around 360 degrees with your iPhone, you have to methodically extinguish the flames you see, thanks to the camera. The fire itself isn’t just a static “enemy” to be dealt with. Flames will propagate and spread if you don’t put them down completely, the fire itself is capable of doing you harm if you’re not careful.
The fact that I need to be quite mobile for my research activities and also that the long daily train rides also should be used to go further with my research work, I invested in a nice MSI Wind U100. It represents one of the actually very popular “Netbooks” or “UMPC”s like the also very common Asus Eee PCs.
First impressions are very good and show that the intended use can be fully covered. Even more applications seem to be possible (Internet,MP3 Player, watching TV,videos…).
I also will test it with some AR software tools and see how it enhances the ubiquitous/pervasive computing augmented reality.
On one of my favorite blogs concerning 3D graphics at Blendernation I just found following very interesting post.
I am happy to see this and I am confident that my research is on the right track. Blender already showed in earlier posts that
it also is a supporting tool to bring Augmented Reality as an emerging technology to the broad masses.
Here’s a *really* nice form of interactive 3D advertising, and it looks like they did the 3D design in Blender.
What appears to be little more than a black and white advertisement in three recent German automotive magazines becomes a 3D holographic model of the Mini Cabrio through a webcam and the Mini website.
The ad works only in IE6 or higher. If you want to try it for yourself, download the PDF of the ad, print it out and head over to the Mini website.
Having an aeronautical engineering background and/or being interesting in the general aviation the following article my be of interest regarding fusing real and virtual flying.
ScienceDaily (Oct. 20, 2008) — Stunt pilots have raced against computer-generated opponents for the first time — in a contest that combines the real and the ‘virtual’ at 250 miles per hour.
Using technology developed, in part, by a University of Nottingham spin-out company, an air-race in the skies above Spain saw two stunt pilots battle it out with a ‘virtual’ plane which they watched on screens in their cockpits.
The ‘virtual’ aircraft was piloted by a computer-gamer who never left the ground, but could likewise see the relative location of the real planes on his own computer screens as the trio swooped around each other during the ‘Sky Challenge’ race. The event could pave the way for massive online competitions, and also demonstrates the power and scope of the very latest in GPS and related systems.
It is very interesting to see that projects like 80days are on the way as path-finding research initiatives of the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme for research and technological development (FP7) to explore new frontiers in Digital Educational Games (DEGs), which combine effective learning with fun and pleasure.
The project description can be found on the relevant project WebSites as follows:
This project is a successor of the ELEKTRA project. 80Days is running for 2,5 years from April 2008 until September 2010. The project focusses on game-based learning and it is coordinated by CSS.
Recreational computer games are overwhelmingly popular. Hence, there is no doubt that educational games, which combine effective learning with fun and pleasure, are a desirable vision. Still, educational games, which can compete with their non-educational counterparts in terms of narrative and gaming quality, have not yet entered the market – especially those for children who are used to the quality of computer games. The main reason is the difficulty in merging both game and educational environments. To cross today’s horizon of educational games, a scientifically sound and valid methodological and technological foundation is required. Grounding on this mission, 80Days is a RTD project concerned with theories, methodologies, and technologies for game-based learning. To accomplish a significant step towards successful and effective educational games, 80Days is addressing the following two main objectives: First, integrating models of adaptive personalised learning with those of adaptive interactive storytelling, and second, merging virtual game environments with existing learning resources, thus reducing development costs and time. These fusions will result in an adaptive and responsive system, enabling the understanding of active learning processes within a virtual learning environment, adapting to individual needs and abilities, and therefore fully exploiting the learners’ capabilities. The quality of this approach will be assured by evaluation activities based on theoretically and empirically sound methods. 80Days entails the smooth integration of interdisciplinary work (learning science, storytelling, game and didactic design, game development, and human-computer interaction). 80Days delivers an innovative and advanced methodological and technological framework for effectively developing successful educational games to be demonstrated by a geography game prototype realising gaming/learning scenarios inspired by Jules Verne’s “Around the world in eighty days”.
EA SPORTS and ESPN change the game in TV Studio Analysis. This interesting news on augmented reality was posted more than 1 month ago and shows the amazing combination of computer game technology and broadcasting:
REDWOOD CITY, Calif. and BRISTOL, Conn. – Sept. 5, 2008 – EA SPORTS™ and ESPN are advancing media convergence and delivering a new enhancement to in-studio sports analysis with the debut of EA SPORTS Virtual Playbook, on ESPN’s award-winning NFL programs. The new television technology, developed jointly by EA SPORTS and ESPN, delivers an “augmented reality” that allows ESPN’s football analysts to interact with the virtual players from EA SPORTS video games and provide insight, education and analysis to fans about key football plays and techniques. EA SPORTS is a Label of Electronic Arts Inc.
See also following posts and publications on this topic:
I participated on October 10th at the LEARNTEC Forum Austria 2008, which was held at FH Wien in Vienna. Freely translated the focus was: "What does future bring?" The main topics especially on the morning sessions were mainly presenting State-of-the-art sessions und future visions of Semantic Web, E-Portfolio and Pervasive Learning. The afternoon showed some best practice examples of the Austrian national railway company OEBB and the ministery of internal affairs.
So the mix of future visions and actual situation in big companies or institutions was a nice combination to see.
[PerAdaMagazine] The article of Simon Dobson, Graeme Stevenson, Graham Williamson, Stephen Knox, Matthew Stabeler, Lorcan Coyle, Steve Neely, and Paddy Nixon gives a very interesting perspective to the issues showing up with research and pratice in building up infrastructure for pervasive computing:
Pervasive computing provides a means of broadening and deepening the reach of information technology (IT) in society. It can be used to simplify interactions with Web sites, provide advanced location-specific services for people on the move, and support all aspects of citizens’ life in the community. Integrating IT services into everyday life requires that we can sense the environment where services are offered, and tailor them as the environment changes. People are not automata, however, and will often perform the same activity in slightly different ways. Moreover, the methods used to sense a person’s actions are inherently error-prone and imprecise, and the same events may be observed from different sensors or information sources. Users’ support needs also evolve over time. These triple problems of situation identification, context fusion, and behavioural evolution constitute the major challenges to building robust pervasive applications or services.
Implementing individual pervasive applications, such as tour guides(1) or healthcare (2), has been straightforward. But it has proved more difficult to build pervasive systems in which a dynamic population of services share infrastructure, sensing, and capabilities. Each new system requires a considerable investment of time to acquire expertise and money to create the necessary infrastructure. We aim to reduce these barriers and simplify the construction of extensible, long-lived pervasive systems.
We have developed our system, Construct, by identifying the best-of-breed techniques that have been successfully implemented for pervasive systems. We have collected these together into a middleware platform, an intermediary between sensors and services. Construct provides a uniform framework for situation identification and context fusion, while providing transparent data dissemination and node management (3).
Figure 1:
Data from sensors like Bluetooth or RFID is aggregated by nodes, which then disseminate the information.
Construct’s basic architecture (see Figure 1) relies on services and sensors that access a distributed collection of nodes, which are responsible for aggregating data from the sensors. Construct regards all data sources as sensors: for example, physical ones for temperature, pressure, and location are included along with virtual ones that access digital and Web resources.
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November 13th, 2009
