Bruce Sterling's Blog, page 741

Augmented Reality: Easyweb Monumental Video Projection

*It's "video mapped projection," AR's nocturnal sister. Very artisanal work, but check out how slick and Hollywood these Easyweb guys are. Nice demo reel! No shaky handheld graphics here….

http://www.easyweb.fr/en/english.html



"Videoprojection monumentale sur tous types de supports. Easyweb.fr specialiste de la video projection spectaculaire et géante…"

More:

Spime Watch: Mobile Barcode companies

*Look how many.

http://theponderingprimate.blogspot.com/2005/06/physical-world-connection-companies.html

MOBILE BAR CODE COMPANIES

23half and their Thrrum Visual Browser
3GVision
5o9 Inc
Abaxia and their MobileTag
ABBYY
Active Print (Hewlett-Packard)
ActiveSymbols
Aeritas
Airclic
AlpsLab
Applied Digital Solutions and their VeriChip
Aura Interactive
Baracoda
BaToo
BeeTagg
BluePulse
BrandAttention
CamClic
[COD:]mmunication
ColorZip Media
ConvergeLabs
CounterFight
DSPV
Daem Interactive
Denim Code
DiMoCo
Digimarc
Domino...

Augmented Reality: GeoVector World Surfer™

http://www.geovector.com/

*Boy, none of that mushy social-media collaborative airtagging from these GeoVector guys. Gonna whip some Microsoft Bing right up against the urban landscape. Point and click™ on the real world™.

*Also, you don't have to blob any video overlays onto stuff: just zap at it, and hope for a search hit. I'd be guessing that a lot of AR apps end up sliding out of "AR geek mode" and into the line-command, one-click interface, once the visual novelty fades.

*Or even just ...

Augmented Reality: Anywhere Augmentation

http://ilab.cs.ucsb.edu/projects/anywhereAugmentation/

"Overview

"We are conducting many different projects with the goal of Anywhere Augmentation. We have introduced this term for the concept of building an AR system that will work in arbitrary environments with no prior preparation. The main goal of this work is to lower the barrier of broad acceptance for augmented reality by expanding beyond research prototypes that only work in prepared, controlled environments. To this end we are...

Augmented Reality: Metaio's Junaio

*Junaio hasn't hit the streets yet. We seem to have rather a growing number of augmented reality browsers. They run on different platforms, they run in different languages, and they run on different providers in different geographic areas. Are we gonna end up with more in the end, or fewer? A thousand flowers, or some future monoculture?

*AR browsers also support AR apps which are themselves specialized, or even Balkanized. So when you whip out your mobile to "Augment" some "Reality,"...

Jon Evans writing in WIRED UK

*I'm a fan of this guy's remarkable novel, INVISIBLE ARMIES.

*Now here he is in WIRED UK, and that's some pretty good stuff.

http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2009-09/18/from-dragons-to-smartphones-in-one-leap.aspx

*The dragon of Favela Chic raises its multicellular head, and starts to look at its streets.

Artificial Paradise, Inc. by Jean-Paul Frenay

*You see this? Right, that's what I mean to say. I meant to say that video is becoming like that.

http://vimeo.com/frenayjp

ARTIFICIAL PARADISE,INC. from Jp Frenay on Vimeo.

Vola Vola by Berardo Carboni

*This mashup of machinina and Second Life techniques — as a feature film — is really disorienting. And it's Italian. So there.

http://nwn.blogs.com/nwn/2009/09/volavola.html

*It feels like something quite huge and terrible is happening to video. I never used to mess with video at all, and now my blog is consistently more and more dominated by various mash-ups of moving graphics. It's like video is becoming a viral dust of small pieces loosely joined. Another ten years of this, and oh...

East German head-mounted binoculars, 1964

*I just had to show these things to somebody.

*I've been trying to crystallize my responses to this East German industrial design collector's show, but I can't do it. Not yet. It's not that East German industrial design is "indescribable" — more that it might take a novel to do that. I'm thinking — a vampire novel.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/brucesterling/sets/72157622263041365/

Augmented Reality: Dennou Coil

*This kids' sci-fi show is hilariously great! Check out all the design-fiction augmented interfaces — head mounts called "Uearaburukonpyuta," glitch-graffiti urban spray cans, and augmented fishing rods complete with live bait!

Denno Coil Episode 1 Part 2 RAW
by computercore999

*No wonder the director likes to hang out with the AR industry. Kind of a BERG London thing going down here, apparently. It means that Warren Ellis is the Mitsuo Iso of Britain!

http://ascii.jp/elem/000/000/409/409940/

*I...