It looks as though the olde D&D or Magic gaming is about to be augmented. This Sony Computer Science Laboratories video shows a game called “The Eye of Judgement” in which players lay out an augmented card game on a table top. The game also appears to have a screen version.

“To praise the heroes who once saved the world, these cards were created”. When you hold up your cards to the computer, it revives the heroes and the battle resumes! Fantastic. But if your opponent is right in front of you - you may have to let the wookie win. Video from Jan. 2007.

http://youtube.com/watch?v=-NNWGP1KlaI

If anyone sees this available or has information let me know!

Total Immersion started in France and is now active in the US, Japan, Korea, and Saudi Arabia. This demo is from early 2007. Revenues of $4M in 2006, forecasting $7M in 2007. They work with Alcatel and Lucent apparently. Hard to tell if the audience is wearing goggles or not. Explains that a core focus will be on games. See it for yourself, in the future, your avatar will dance all over print media!

In the future, people will jump up and down and punch invisible purple spheres. This video shows a variety of applications, mostly artistic. The urban scenes are fantastic. The future will also have some pretty cool sound effects. Apparently, artists will be able to create entirely new species of animals to populate the augmented spaces. If anyone knows the source let me know. Dates from late 2006.

This very interesting 3 minute video focuses on augmented books and displays springing from other flat surfaces. It also and explains the use of “markers”. Looks like it comes from Australia. And, guess what, looks like some of the first colonizers of the augmented world will be furries.

Moisture farm AR Tatooine
An odd, echo-y voice says “one of your evaporators has been damaged”. “Attention: bantha heard nearby”.

Yes you read correctly, this is an augmented reality Tatooine. One can almost smell the banthas but I’m only scared the voice will say “Let the Tusken Raiders win”.  Let’s see if we can find the the table-top battle chess from Episode 4.

This video is by a French company that here demos AR for auto manufacturing. Video dates to 2005. If you can determine the name of the firm please let me know. Now, this video itself is created “virtually” meaning the audience was viewing the demo on a screen, not seeing the live cars as you see it.

This video shows some really practical applications and the animations are top notch.

If I can find out more about this I’ll update the post.

This article dates to 2002.  It explains what computer interfaces will look like “in the next 10 years”.  Now, it’s 2007 and we’re almost halfway there.  Or are we?  Remember - Da Vinci invented the helicopter 500 years ago.  Whatever we see emerge from augmented reality will likely look as different from what’s in the lab now, as Da Vinci’s model helicopters look compared to today’s real ones.  This is an interesting article with lots of historical information.

Read the article: Augmented Reality: A New Way of Seeing 

Now this is what I’m talking about. Developers Daniel Wagner, Thomas Pintaric, Florian Ledermann, and Dieter Schmalstieg of Vienna University of Technology created this project in which a 3D train is displayed on an HP Ipaq. The track exists in “real life” (aka. RL) and the train is augmented. The site contains lots of movies and a PDF explaining the approach.

PDF: http://studierstube.icg.tu-graz.ac.at/invisible_train/documents/wagner05_pervasive.pdf

Site: http://studierstube.icg.tu-graz.ac.at/invisible_train/

Photo credit: Vienna University of Technology

A-Rage is an augmented reality game development platform. Based in Australia, they have been active since 2003.

They have developed a few games with dinosaurs and flying saucers that ov

Multiverse, the DIY MMOG developer toolkit, shows off it’s scalability in this new (silent) video.

It shows how the world can handle 150 active avatars in one world simultaneously. For world developers this could help solve one of the main problems of virtual worlds, which is getting large groups together in the same world in the same place. You can login to their beta social world now so pop in and check out this emerging platform.