I don’t think I’ve ever had a post dedicated entirely to a Microsoft product but this is awesome.  Below is a video from the TED conference which shows off the augmented reality features in Bing Maps. The video is long, around 8 minutes, but it gets better and better as it progresses.

[via Alden Torres on Google Buzz]

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MIT Media Lab’s SixthSense Project provides a peek into our digital future. The one sentence description of SixthSense found on the official blog reads: ”‘SixthSense’ is a wearable gestural interface that augments the physical world around us with digital information and lets us use natural hand gestures to interact with that information.” The video below demonstrates various ways in which SixthSense can augment reality. Below the video I will include some information about the technology.

Pranav Mistry, a PhD candidate at MIT, is the inventor of SixthSense and is featured in the video… the technology isn’t bad for a 28 year old :) who received stand-up applause at TED when the video above was shown. According to Professor Pattie Maes, who oversees the project at MIT, the basic equipment used in SixthSense is a combination of off-the-shelf computer equipment (and ordinary marker caps for the fingers) that in total sell for about $350. As can be seen in the video, the two primary components are a webcam and a small video projector. SixthSense connects to the internet via a smartphone’s data connection. More about SixthSense project is available on ted.com and on the official blog.

[discovered via Bitly.Tv]

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Below is a video of TOPPS 3D Live baseball cards, the first to include augmented reality. These are truly amazing!

If augmented reality is new to you, you may want to read my post which explains augmented reality and has five video examples. Three of the examples you can try yourself if you have a printer and webcam. The baseball card example above was in a Mashable post today that includes 10 augmented reality examples. It is Mashable’s most popular article of the day.

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What are you writing about?  I haven’t heard of Augmented Reality.

Wikipedia offers the following definition:  ”Augmented reality (AR) is a term for a live direct or indirect view of a physical real-world environment whose elements are merged with (or augmented by) virtual computer-generated imagery – creating a mixed reality.”  In other words, computer graphics are inserted into a view or image of the real world.

AR can best be understood by illustration.  Consider this scenario.  You are shopping for a home.  In the un-augmented world, you might look for For Sale signs, knock on doors, call brokers and browse the web.  With AR, however, you might just drive down the streets that interest you.  Next, you would snap your cellphone camera at a house.  It would process the image and report information back to you.  The information would be overlaid on the image you see of the neighborhood either on your phone’s screen or with a pair of special glasses.  You would know which houses are for sale.  You might see the asking price of the home, pictures of the interior and maybe even a video virtual tour of the home.  As you move down the street, you would learn about the next prospective house.

Maybe you are touring a city and you know nothing about the restaurants near your hotel.  You could simply walk down the street and pull up overlaid images of restaurant interiors, menus and even find out whether they are busy or not.

That is years away, right?  No.  There are AR tours being offered in some cities.  There are even smartphone apps that can do some of this already.  Layar is the most well known AR phone app and it is already available for the iPhone and Android devices.  Examples follow.

Below is a video that gives an example of how AR works in the Layar “reality browser”:

If you don’t have an iPhone or Android device, you can still try out AR examples with a webcam over the internet.  These examples are somewhat different but still quite interesting.  They require printing out a target and holding it up to your webcam.  It will produce an image on your screen with an animation added to your reality.

GE’s Plug Into the Smart Grid (web)

Papervision’s Little Monster (web)

BMW’s Virtual Z4 (requires download and install)

Below is an example of an AR business card:

If you know of any other web-based examples, please kindly post a comment with a link.

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