Legendary AR developer Metaio will launch Junaio on the 2nd of November. And it will be initially for the iPhone, and later for Android and Symbian. This is vice versa to how Layar started, which was exclusively for the Android at start.

Junaio coined a much better term for their application than Layar in my opinion; they called it “Outernet” (get it?). This much better describes what it does than Layar’s “Reality Browser”. It just seemed so vague… The word “reality” could be interpreted in so many ways you don’t get an immediate idea what it is. It calls for explanations. Outernet sounds so much like Internet that the thought “hmm… internet for outside?” pops up on most people’s minds first. Ah well, it’s just a term. Check out Bruce Sterling’s keynote of Layar 2.0 regarding his thoughts about naming. Really interesting.

I just think it’s brilliant. Competition amongst giants is always good for us consumers aye? ;)

Anyway, check out the introduction movie made by my 5 year old kid brother at their site: http://www.junaio.com/

Metaio also has more experience and in-house knowledge of peripherals (other than phones), so I’m actually expecting them to make the first step towards “Outernet” with AR-glasses.

Still, to break my radiosilence:

A publisher released an Opus about Michael Jackson. In this book they added markers which will play videoclips on their site www.michaeljacksonopus.com

I kinda liked this one because it’s not really the main media used in this product. The main product is a book, and it’s using augmented reality to, dare I say it, augment the book.

You don’t have to use AR to get the most out of it, you could still read this on the coffee table.

It’s stupid you have to get up, move to your computer, turn it on and wait in order to get the most out of your product.

Crossmedial products are awesome, but sometimes we just think up something to go with the hype and get some extra attention…

In my humble opinion, Nokia seems to be delivering the best concepts.

Sure these might not see actual daylight within the next 5 or 10 years. But I do feel Nokia is the company which has the best knowhow. Both technically and aesthetically.

see: (or: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CGwvZWyLiBU)

So! Biggest news: few weeks ago I got sent to visit the “NEXT Layar event!”, which on paper sounded quite exciting! The first dutch Augmented Reality conference/event/meeting sponsored by none other than Layar? (to clarify: Layer succesfully launched a ‘real life browser’ some time ago. It uses the compass, GPS and internet to find information or locations in your direct area. It got critical acclaim all over the world, not bad for some dutch company). When the company I work for asked me if I would like to go, naturally I said yes. A chance to see one of the first AR Events in holland. To see how far AR has become.

Ah yes, the legendary Rode Hoed in Amsterdam. Whenever there was a great marketingrelated speech, it would be there. I actually recognized the interior from a talk Jospeh Pine gave on Mobile Mondays regarding… ah never mind that.

The event itself… I expected more talks from the respectable ar companies that are scattered around the world (maybe Metaio, SPRX or Total Immersion). But alas, as you might have concluded allready, it wasn’t really that groundbreaking… What actually -was- presented there was the new and improved Layar 2.0.

Now don’t get me wrong, I do think these kinds of events that spark a lot of (inter)national buzz around AR are quite important to the development of it. But seeing Layar I think we still have got a long way to go till we reach something that will actually work naturally.

Well that sounded a bit too negative towards Layar. Let me put it this way. I can’t see this tool being integrated in daily life, but I can understand marketeers, investers, ar-philosophers and developers like yours truly seeing this tool being a great first step towards true augmented reality.Or Augmented Reality in the sense of mobile, augmented vision or terminator vision. However you might call it. It’s a feat I greatly respect Layar for, but I don’t consider the product worth using.

The event itself started out great with speaker Bruce Sterling, an american Science Fiction writer, who philosophized about the new jobs AR is creating (and older jobs who need to be updated, like interaction designers). I was intrigued by his thoughts on how much AR could actually influence people. According to him Augmented Reality can be so visually intuitive that even little children and digital illiterates (sp?) can easily “get it”.

Furthermore he shared my thoughts that this hype is something we’ll all need to go through. I myself remember Virtual Reality being the buzzword of the 90′s for like 5 years before it finally died down a little (a fine example of a pitfall product right here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_Boy).

Sterling then continued to point out more threats and opportunities, one other worth mentioning is the trend of mobile screens getting smaller and smaller effectively minimizing your field of view… in an unrelated event, another speaker predicted mobile monitor screens will actually increase again since monitor flexibility, weight and required hardware volume has decreased also.

After Sterling warmed up the crowed with his great future vision. The CEO (if I remember correctly) of Layar came up to the stage and announced the new version.

Key features to this upgrade were:

- new looks

- more use of phone functions (I guess the compass of the iPhone)

- added acces to  social networking

- featured and popular layars

- with the release came 500 new API Keys to hand out to developers

- some more fixes.

(pity enough the big balls on top of a grid still remain)

Next up was the main developer guy to tell us a bit more about how you set up a Layar. Which was surprisingly easy! They even let the CEO fill in some textfields and with the flick of a button he added his own Layar. It’s like customizing your Myspace-page or Hyves. There’s a lot of options, but it’s all just filling in fields.

After that there was a quick demo of the product, a word from their sponsor, a prize handout and the great post-conference mingling could commence. Being quite the neophyte (always wanted to use that word) to this whole networking thing, I mostly sat back and watched how everyone partnered up. Had some smalltalk with someone who was looking for a layar-developer, but nothing more interesting surfaced at that point.

Well this was pretty much how I experienced it.

It’s a great development, but I feel the execution could be so much better.

This sparks some cool possibilities on combining Augmented Reality with the popular video-sharing website.

If you have some 3D-glasses lying around I suggest you take a gander at: (look for the drop-down menu)

The problem is, you’d have to visit a specific site to see the animation (which kinda takes away the use of the card). But the wow-factor still remains. Looks spiffy!

Combination of Papervision & FLARtoolkit? Or maybe even a hint of processing?

**EDIT**

a quick peek at his site revealed it’s the first. He colored planes based on a video and depening on the brightness made them move forward or backward. Genious!

But my suspicions regarding processing seemed almost right. He does know how processing works. Seems that helps a lot when building visual experiments like these.

Wish I had time to experiment with AR again… or maybe start diving into Processing. Could be helpfull when i’ll start with Pixelbender.

AR Business Card from James Alliban on Vimeo.

iPhone 3GS Augmented Reality from Chris Hughes on Vimeo.

Check it out at: http://spazout.com/

My conceptfilm I made on which I graduated on:

The idea behind this is, that Rotterdam Marketing asked me to offer visitors of Rotterdam an unforgetable experience of the city. With that I set out to find authentic Rotterdam stories about the city and found one on the Noordereiland (which is an island in the middle of the city and is kinda shaped like a boat).

Here I placed a few of those coin-operated tourist telescopes and made them look at the skylines of Rotterdam in a Augmented Reality-way.

Not really groundbreaking, but I liked how he added the social networking sites to his concept.