We’re currently working on a number of Augmented Reality projects which should see the light of day in the New Year. We were also recently approached by prestigious design magazine Wallpaper, to produce a series of Augmented Reality applications for their very first AR issue.

We didn’t have very long to build them and there was a fair bit of overtime involved but the end result was worth it. The piece was directed by Noah Harris at Blinkart with 3D modelling by Glassworks.

So rush out and buy the magazine and then go here to interact with the applications.

Over the past couple of months I’ve had the chance to get in a bit of research and development time with Unity, and one of the areas I have looked at is Augmented Reality. By far the most entertaining experiment so far has been my “AR Driving” demo. It could be said that this particular demo isn’t strictly AR (because it doesn’t overlay graphics on the video stream) but still, it uses AR technology to map the orientation of an AR marker to the steering, acceleration and braking of a car. I recently demoed it in our London office, result: Fun!

The demo works by reading the orientation of a single AR marker printed on an A4 sheet. The sheet is folded so that the marker is visible to the camera on one side, and a steering wheel image is visible on the other side – so the user knows which way up to hold the paper!

The rotation around the Z axis (as in, turning the steering wheel) is mapped to the car steering, although not entirely linearly – in order to make the controls easy to use it required a few tweaks, such as smoothing out the sometimes jittery raw data, and giving bias to a ‘not-quite-dead zone’ around the zero-degrees rotation area to make it easier to drive the car in a straight line.

The acceleration and braking controls are implemented by reading the “tilt” of the marker around the X axis. Holding the marker straight-on to the camera gives the equivalent of a steady gentle press on the accelerator. Tilting the top edge towards the camera pushes down the accelerator, while tilting it away releases the accelerator completely and applies the brakes.

The final result is a fairly intuitive driving control, and most people who had a try in the office seemed to find the car responsive and easy to control on their first try, as the video shows!

I like my Augmented Reality (AR) like a Swiss Army knife utility, functional.  Just because you technically could make an egg whisk for the knife, should you? At what point does something that can offer lasting value become a cheap trick, done only for the sake of using the technology?

Although this does necessarily mean that I am advocating a tyranny of practical utility on AR, rather there should be context, purpose, relevance and meaning in an execution; not just an augmented overlay on the physical world, used only for whimsy effect. For every working execution, for example, the UPS Package application, there are playful and fun romps, such as the Bigfoot AR, that showcase imagination and usefulness – making us smile is still one of the greatest tricks that a piece of advertising can play on us.

There is a range of possibilities with AR, and over time, rather than look at how the medium can entertain, consider where is can extend and change what people are doing in society for the better.

Technology as Anthropology is an emerging theme that agencies, businesses, and academics are analyzing – how technology influences culture and creates new behaviours.  The iPhone is changing not only how we spend our time on a commute, but though applications like FixMyStreet, how we can interact with our local authorities to make our community better and safer.

Brands that harness core human values for improving and bettering our condition, in a way that Johnson and Johnson has for parents, through the BabyCenter site, will lead; and those that do for cheap effect, such as the Pepsi Amp App, shall follow.

Technical solutions should enable these socially-led marketing executions to go beyond what is just titillating or amusing. The TED lectures are a responsible zeitgeist that demonstrates the possibilities of blending technology with social conscience.

A recent collection of apps that allow you to locate underground transport , created with the GEO / Orientation features of the iPhone, and AR, show what meaningful executions are possible. With time, more data is going to be either embedded into objects, situations and via devices, people -  then the possibilities start to get very interesting. Real time display of beliefs, vital life signs and knowledge could be shown for others  to view and interact with, enhancing communications and value exchange.

Otherwise, without a compass to why and how, we are just adding additional functions to the campaign, those that are not only unnecessary, but damage the utility of the core use of a tool, to help – to have sometime to pass down, not just on. We need to avoid the absurd conclusion, irrational in its rationality, that one more item, feature or piece of functionality gives us more, not less.

In short, more reality, less augmentation.

After the success of my Augmented Reality business card application I was fortunate enough to be invited to Adobe MAX 2009 in LA by the O’Reilly guys, to talk about my experiences with AR. Here are my impressions of the conference.

The keynote kicked the conference off with a real bang. These initial talks are renowned for being fairly dull affairs but Adobe pulled out all the stops to make this one something to behold. It started with an incredible dance performance by one of Adobe’s charitable endeavours, the Peapod academy. A discussion on the developments of the Flash platform followed. This included discussions of the new features built into AIR, a sneak look into the the latest developments in the openscreen project and a discussion of ColdFusion and LiveCycle with a look at some extraordinary enterprise projects. The climax was the announcement (after a hilarious Apple slanging Myth-Busters take off) that Apple was now accepting Flash applications into the App store. Now this isn’t exactly Flash in the iPhone browser but it’s certainly a positive step forward.

But by far the most awe-inspiring spectacle was the extended screener of James Cameron’s Avatar. A pair of 3D glasses, a 6th row seat and a massive 50ft screen heightened the experience to the point where I literally shivered in my seat. The producer John Landau passionately introduced each scene and discussed the extent to which Adobe software was used in the making of the movie.

Although there was a vast amount of sessions, as an interactive artist and non-Flex using Actionscript developer, I initially struggled to fill my schedule. There was a whole host of top flight Flash developers such as Ralph Hauwert and Andre Michell (regulars on the Flash conference circuit) missing from the list. However, the day before the conference started, I learned that Influxis had flown a bunch of them over to talk at the FITC Unconference sessions. For me, this development filled several gaps and led to my schedule being significantly reshuffled.

My main highlights included:

Joshua Davis was as inspirational and entertaining as ever in his Space talk. His latest experiments and influences were explained with a great deal of energy and enthusiasm, impressive for a 9am slot. I enjoyed watching the developments of each project from initial idea through to the finished product. His investigation into bezier curves was fantastic, as was his installation and iPhone work. This will be Joshua’s last speaking engagement for 2 years as he plans to have a well deserved rest.

Being an Augmented Reality monkey, I was inevitably going to end up attending Tomohiko Koyama AKA Saqoosha and Yoshihiro Shindo’s talk on FLARToolkit and the Japanese open source Flash community the Spark Project. It was great to hear about the history of the project and the inner workings of the AR library from the guy who wrote it. Almost as impressive was the huge tea-cosy like bear hat that he wore throughout the talk and for the rest of the day. I had a chat with Saqoosha afterwards and gushed like a schoolgirl whist droning on about how much I loved using his code library. He didn’t seem to mind. Nice guy.

A few great FITC Unconference sessions followed. Seb-Lee Delisle wowed us all with his playful work. Highlights of the talk included a look at his 5kb 3D Lunar Lander game, a walk through his fantastic 3D Big and Small website and participating in a 3D version of Pong with the rest of the audience. Ralph Hauwert was up next. Ralph is one of, if not the top 3D Flash developer on the planet. By the end we were all stunned by his experiments with fluidic, dynamically lit, interactive geometric shapes. And all this in Flash, and at a very high frame rate. Koen de Weggheleire was up next with a talk on some of the latest features in Flash Player 10. He deserves a special mention for dancing around like a crazed baboon to cheesy house music whilst demonstrating the TriangleMesh feature. Sheer entertainment.

The Adobe MAX awards ceremony followed with special guest Mark Hamill. An inspired choice considering the crowd, Hamill was highly entertaining throughout. We left before the sneak peaks to get ready for the evening but I was later reliably informed that one of the Adobe guys did some live coding dressed in a Chewbacca costume. Wild.

The MAX Bash followed and was an impressive affair. Adobe had taken over almost every establishment in the L.A. Live park. In addition to a Star Wars themed area, complete with Chubacca and Darth Vadar exhibits, Mark Hamill joined the party and was predictably mobbed the moment he arrived. Later that night we met up with some great guys from Sapient and had a ball at the Latin club.

The following morning was my talk, Augmented Reality in the Flash Player with Jesse Freeman. Both halves went very well, we got an above average rating and there were plenty of questions and positive feedback afterwards. Jesse introduced the FLARToolkit library and discussed some of his own work with limitations and the future of FLAR. My half was a discussion of my experiences with FLAR and a discussion of promotion in the field My advice for anyone planning a presentation – make sure you have lots of comical images in your slide show. There’s nothing like a few cheap gags to get the audience on your side. A bit of research is also useful.

I’m pleased to say that we had an above average rating for the talk and had a great write up on digitalarts.co.uk.

Breathing a huge sigh of relief after, I ventured out to see a few of the other MAX talks. The best of the day was A Deep Dive into 10 Innovative Projects for Flash by Thibault Imbert and Michaël Chaize. Some of the better projects were Tomek Augustyn’s face tracking library, HiSlope, due for release soon, and the WiiFlash server which allows Flash developers to use WiiMotes, Nunchuks and Wii Boards as input devices. Another great talk included Kevin Hoyt’s Integrating Flash and Hardware. In a nutshell this session explained how to use a variety of different sensors in Flash using electronics equipment. A must for any aspiring installation artist.

Although initially it was a struggle to find relevant sessions, I was consistently impressed with the scale and quality of the event, the welcoming and informative staff and (in the end) the range of talks on Flash. My fiance Juliet Lall accompanied me, and found the talks on After Effects and Illustrator to be very helpful. I would definitely recommend Adobe MAX to the typical user of Adobe’s range of software. And if Influxis continue to invite the top Flash guys I would recommend it to the atypical rest.

A few of us here at Skive have banded together to create an Augmented Reality submission for this year’s e4 E Sting competition. For those of you not in the know, E Stings are the short clips that feature between the programs and adverts.

Anyway. Here’s what we came up with:

It was Lee Daley who suggested we make an AR entry. He also did the 3D work. Since then my fiance Juliet Lall has graced the project with some illustrations and Rakesh Mistry has taken control of the video production. I did all the Flash development and took the role of project leader.

15 E Stings will make it on-air and there have been over 750 entries. Let’s hope the lure of a free AR application will improve my chances!

Since my AR Business Card went viral (over 300,000 views to date) both myself and Skive have had a great deal of attention. Skive are currently working on, pitching and persuing around 7 AR flash projects for some big brands.

Myself, several other Actionscript developers and our 3D artist have been looking into FLARToolkit (the Flash AR code library) and are fully up to speed in this area. We are working on a few more viral videos and concept stuff and have produced a few examples, including our very own logo.

In addition to this we are dedicating time to research a variety of other AR approaches including colour and face detection and languages such as C++ and Objective C (iPhone).

So watch this space over the next couple of months, we should be releasing some fascinating, functional and playful AR applications.

Well, it’s been an interesting week to say the least. Although I have physically handed my new business card to only a handful of people it has reached enough to fill Wembly Stadium twice over.

About 6 weeks ago, in my spare time I created an Augmented Reality business card and posted it on my blog and Vimeo. I had a small initial rush of a couple of thousand views and then it quietened down. Standard story.

Then last week things went absolutely mental. By the end of the week I had had 40,000 hits on my blog and 180,000 views of my Video. I was being Tweeted something silly and blogged by such giants as Engadget, Popular Science, Gizmodo, Notcot, The Times and many others.

As a result, several big brands have approached me expressing an interest in working with Skive on Augmented Reality projects. I’ve had parties approach me for interviews, articles, tutorials and to be involved in books and conferences.

It was fascinating to see how interest in this piece of work evolved over several days. There was an absolute digital ripple effect. It seems that Twitter played a huge part in driving the success throughout. It’s great to see, first hand, social media acting as a vehicle for non-commercial work to gain such a huge audience in a small space of time.

So where to from here? I will be continuing to experiment using AR but in addition to investigating it at home I will be doing some more R&D work. So who wants an AR application? Form an orderly queue…

Acrossair is one of the first augmented reality applications to go live on the iPhone AppStore. Using the phone’s video function, the application shows Londoners where the nearest tube stations are in relation to their location. The app tells you how far away (in kilometers) you are from the station, as well as what lines operate out of the station.

Click here to see the app in action.

This is an excellent example of adding utility to augmented reality (AR). Although AR has been around for over a year it has recently become very popular in marketing communications for a number of brands. The danger of such popular technologies is ‘bandwagoning,’ where marketers create applications which serve no real purpose other than to appear current.

This is a great execution from Amnesty International in Hamburg, Germany, calling attention to the problem of domestic abuse. The billboard features a picture of a happy couple standing together with the caption, “It happens when nobody is watching”. When the observer looks away the image changes to the man abusing his partner.

The billboard works by scanning its proximity with an eye-tracking camera, which triggers an image switch on the display panel when it senses someone looking at it. The change only occurs after a brief delay, so that observers understand what’s going on, and get the message.

This received a lot of press and consumer interaction and is a fantastic way of calling attention to and illustrating a difficult concept.

What other propositions could be applied using this technology?

Read more here.