GM’s Awesome Augmented Reality Windshield [Driving]

We love technology that makes us feel like we’re living in the future. Case in point: General Motors has been working with several universities to develop a working next-generation heads-up display that turns an ordinary windshield into an augmented reality information dashboard.
Such a system can improve safety and advance knowledge behind the wheel, visually identifying important objects in physical space like road signs and the edges of the road you’re on in conditions of poor visibility. It can even bring GPS functions right into the dashboard by outlining the exact building you’re going to. Check out a demo of the system in action below.
The HUD windshield uses night vision, navigation and camera-based sensors to gather data relevant to your surroundings as you drive, and ultraviolet lasers project corresponding images onto the windshield surface. GM says to look for this system being incorporated into its vehicles in the near future.
Would you be excited to have an AR windshield in your next car?





Tags: AR, Augmented Reality, cars, GM, gps, technology, transportation
[Mashable]

Parrot AR.Drone turns your living room into a virtual battlefield [AR]

Last time we checked in with Parrot's AR.Drone quadricopter, we were told that game developers would be putting together some games to play with the drone. Parrot recently showed off what those games look like.


You've got three major flavors to choose from when it comes to playing with the AR.Drone: single player, dual mode and against a robot. The single player mode sees the drone hovering in the middle of the room while you dogfight with virtual opponents. With an attachment atop the AR.Drone, you can compete against other players using virtual rockets and guns. Finally, the robot mode has you going up against a simulated robotic foe, which in real life just looks like a board with circles printed on it.

Most of the augmented reality games play out in such a way that you're trying to keep your drone aimed at a target long enough to fire, while dodging incoming fire and avoiding lock-ons. It's all visible in the video that's streamed to your iPhone-turned-controller.

The Parrot AR.Drone doesn't have a release date or price, yet, but you can check it out in the video down below.


[DVICE via Joystiq]

Put on Your Google Goggles and Visually Search the World [Google]

Google’s breaking news left and right today. Of course the big news is that real-time search is live, but the release of Google Goggles can’t be overlooked. The brand-new addition to Google Labs is an experimental application for Android devices that supports visual search.

How does it work? Just open the app, snap a photo and voilà: Google will process the image and return search results. The photo search functionality eliminates the need to type or say anything on your mobile device, and it adds context to your real-world surroundings.

While the technology is pretty remarkable, Google admits that it is still in its infancy. So while some image searches work brilliantly — think photos of books, business cards, artwork, places, logos and landmarks — don’t be too disappointed if your image searches for food, animals, plants and cars are less than stellar.

Still, the application should prove useful, and we hope to see versions of it made available for other smartphone users as well. For now, though, iPhone users can turn to a number of different augmented reality applications for camera-enabled search functionality.

Watch the video below for a demonstration of Google Goggles.




[Mashable]

Holographic laser head-up display, small enough for side mirror

Increasingly popular head-up displays aren't only for BMWs, Corvettes , Cadillacs, and F-16 jets. Light Blue Optics is making the tech more practical, creating a new projection device that's so small, it'll fit in a car's side mirror. It shows you an image that looks like it's about 6 feet behind you, superimposed over the road.

This trickery is possible because of a miniaturized holographic laser projector that's about a tenth the size of the head-up display system in the BMW 5 Series. It's small enough to install in a variety of configurations, and will work equally well on the windshield, or rearview mirrors and side mirrors.

These displays will be safer, too. The data appears to your eyes to be the same distance as other objects on the road, making it so you don't need to waste time focusing. Says Light Blue Optics head of business development Edward Buckley, 'At speeds of 100 kilometers an hour, this can cost you 22 meters in stopping distance.' Too bad Buckley says we won't see this technology in vehicles for four more years.
[DVICE via Technology Review]

Mobilizy Proposes Open AR Markup Language

It’s been a big day for Augmented Reality news. On the heels of the announcement of Layar’s support for 3D objects, Mobilizy, maker of Wikitude World Browser, announced that it’s proposing an open Augmented Reality markup language (ARML).
ARML would be based on KML and “enriched with custom extensions.”

The basic idea behind this specification is that data that is prepared using this specification can be viewed on augmented reality browsers like Wikitude but also in Google Earth. Augmented reality browsers can include an open URL dialog where the user can enter an URL pointing to a valid ARML document. For instance such a document can contain all affiliates of a company. People can easily bookmark those URLs.

ReadWriteWeb notes that “such a step would remove one of the five barriers to AR that we recently wrote about: interoperability. Cross-platform, open development standards would allow users more ways to see more AR content. … It will also accelerate innovation and allow for more, better, and less expensive AR apps.”
This video from Mobilizy sums it up to the tune of a “Cinemax: After Dark” soundtrack:

[AndroidGuys]

Layar Brings Semi-Augmented Reality to Your Android Phone [Downloads]

Android: 'Augmented Reality' is a buzz phrase gaining a lot of notice lately. Free Android app Layar, one of the first full-featured AR apps for Android, layers helpful, location-specific data on top of whatever you're looking at through your device's camera.
In a true-to-form augmented reality app, a phone's camera would be used to provide a live video stream, and the application would analyze objects in that stream and interact with them in some way. This video demonstrates what the future will likely hold for motion-sensitive, GPS-enabled, decent-camera-toting phones—with zombies:



Until phones catch up to developers' ambitions, we have half-breed apps like Layar that pull in geographic data from your phone's GPS location, check it against web databases, and then show the locations of nearby subway stations, restaurants, and more overlaid on the image of your surroundings from your phone's camera. Android phones allow apps to access the video stream for overlays, while the iPhone 3GS picked up that ability with the 3.1 firmware update, as ReadWriteWeb details. Here's how Layar's developers demonstrate the app in their native Amsterdam:



For a real-world, smaller-city test, I grabbed a T-Mobile G1 and headed to Buffalo's Elmwood Avenue commercial strip, with a side venture to Main Street, to see what Layar could show me. The app has a single view and function that pulls in your camera's video stream, but you can switch up what 'layer' you see over it on the fly. The layers, listed at Layar's web site, come from web services with big geographic data piles, like Wikipedia, review site Yelp, real estate finder Trulia, and sites that mash up social apps like Flickr and Twitter. Yelp and Flickr (pulled in as 'FlickAR' in this app) are, as you might imagine, the most densely packed of the apps I tried. You normally turn your camera, or yourself, to get thumbnail data on any 'blips' that come up in Layar. When you come up with clusters of results in layers like Yelp, though, you'll end up switching to the less impressive list view, because trying to pinpoint individual finds will have passersby wondering why it looks like you're trying to rotate the world with your phone.

I didn't get any results for local tweets or Trulia real estate findings, but an architectural society layer and Wikipedia yielded a few fun surprises. If you were new in a city and looking for something to check out, Layar might well be worth the time (and battery drain) to check out. Who wouldn't want to check out the spot where President William McKinley was shot in Buffalo, or the seriously creepy spires of the H.R. Richardson 'State Lunatic Asylum'? Layar is neat stuff, and will probably get better as more developers buy into it.

Layar is a free download for Android phones only. If you've used the app for something useful, fun, or something in-between, tell us about it, and post pictures, in the comments.

BMW's Augmented Reality Glasses Remake Mere Man Into Master Mechanic [Cars]

If BMW's research labs have a say, future service staff will learn the intricacies of working on German cars through a pretty handy looking augmented reality interface.
Look beyond the cheesiness of the music, smug actor and his Oakley Thumps for a moment and actually examine the incredible practicality at work—highlighting/identifying parts of an engine and offering step by step instructions for completing complicated procedures. Give me a world UI like this, and I won't just change my own air filter. I'll be able to remove my own appendix.

Oh, and my brain will never memorize how to do anything ever again, but let's forget that part... [BMW via MediaIte via Jalopnik]

Electronic Contact Lenses Promise Future of Advanced Augmented Vision

Babak A. Parviz, an associate professor at the University of Washington whose research was seen on our pages before, wrote an article for IEEE Spectrum discussing the work of his team to develop electronic contact lenses to provide continuous monitoring of glucose, augmented vision, and potential other implications of the technology. Parviz also gives a rundown of the challenges involved in creating functional in-lens displays that users can focus on at such a short distance.

From the article:

The glucose detectors we’re evaluating now are a mere glimmer of what will be possible in the next 5 to 10 years. Contact lenses are worn daily by more than a hundred million people, and they are one of the only disposable, mass-market products that remain in contact, through fluids, with the interior of the body for an extended period of time. When you get a blood test, your doctor is probably measuring many of the same biomarkers that are found in the live cells on the surface of your eye—and in concentrations that correlate closely with the levels in your bloodstream. An appropriately configured contact lens could monitor cholesterol, sodium, and potassium levels, to name a few potential targets. Coupled with a wireless data transmitter, the lens could relay information to medics or nurses instantly, without needles or laboratory chemistry, and with a much lower chance of mix-ups.
Three fundamental challenges stand in the way of building a multipurpose contact lens. First, the processes for making many of the lens’s parts and subsystems are incompatible with one another and with the fragile polymer of the lens. To get around this problem, my colleagues and I make all our devices from scratch. To fabricate the components for silicon circuits and LEDs, we use high temperatures and corrosive chemicals, which means we can’t manufacture them directly onto a lens. That leads to the second challenge, which is that all the key components of the lens need to be miniaturized and integrated onto about 1.5 square centimeters of a flexible, transparent polymer. We haven’t fully solved that problem yet, but we have so far developed our own specialized assembly process, which enables us to integrate several different kinds of components onto a lens. Last but not least, the whole contraption needs to be completely safe for the eye. Take an LED, for example. Most red LEDs are made of aluminum gallium arsenide, which is toxic. So before an LED can go into the eye, it must be enveloped in a biocompatible substance.

Link @ IEEE Spectrum: Augmented Reality in a Contact Lens...

Wikitude Drive Android Nav App Takes Augmented Reality to Your Car's Dashboard [Android Apps]

Mobilizy's Wikitude, an augmented reality app that overlays Wikipedia links onto your camera's viewfinder, is still one of the most amazing apps in the Android Market. Wikitude Drive, which does the same with turn-by-turn directions, does it one better.
As you can see in the video, Mobilzy's take on the turn-by-turn video overlay isn't the most refined—a nod to Blaupunkt on that one—and it seems a little distracting to use, as is. But that's not to say that the concept isn't fantastic, for one simple reason: Your eyes never really leave the road. Normal nav apps just show you a static, mapped representation of what's coming, which does fine on the directions-giving front, but utterly fails on the helping-you-not-run-over-children-on-bikes front.
Aside from the AR feature, the app is a little bare, it requiring a data connection at all times, supporting voice commands only via a separate voice engine, lacking most of Wikitude's other over features, though informational overlays probably aren't too wise on a turn-by-turn HUD. Mobilzy says it's coming 'soon,' hopefully alongside a partnership with one of the big map data suppliers, so we can actually use this thing. [Mobilzy]