What is really interesting to me about Layar Vision, which has also been highlighted in a number of writeups about the launch, is that by giving the smartphone the capability to recognize real-world objects no matter where they are located, you can get around one of the big challenges in implementing AR. By putting the focus on objects rather than locations, you don’t have to create a database of geotagged objects with specific locations. If a user wants augmented content for a new video game, they can scan the game at any place and still get the content. By the same token, if you want the specials at a particular restaurant, you can just scan the menu, no matter where you are sitting in the restaurant. If a developer wants to combine that augmented content with location-specific info, they can link the Layar Vision functionality to other location-based data sets and functions.

Of course, Layar Vision as well as the Layar platform are really developer tools, and the goal is to get consumer applications out there that are built on the platform. To try to get developers working with Layar Vision, Layar is sponsoring the Layar Creation Challenge, which is offering cash prizes to developers who come up with the most useful and innovative concepts for Layar Vision centered around the publishing industry, which is an area where the Layar folks think the technology will really be effective.

What do you think? Is augmented reality finally going to hit the mainstream?

Via FastCompany

Via TechTree

Via Engadget and MIT Technology Review

For more information about CrisisCamp, check out the CrisisCommons Wiki. Here is a list of planned events. If you are near any of the CrisisCamp Haiti locations, head over and help out!

Over on this side of the pond, New York City is sponsoring the NYC BigApps Competition, “which will reward the developers of the most useful, inventive, appealing, effective, and commercially viable applications for delivering information from the City of New York’s NYC.gov Data Mine to interested users.” Although this competition is not restricted to geospatial apps, many of the 85 entries are location-based or mapping apps, such as NYC BigMaps and PrimoSpot to name just two. Application submissions ended on December 8th, but you can still participate by voting for your favorite application between now and January 7, 2010.

The deadline to submit your entry is Friday September 18th, 5pm(UK time). The winner will be announced at the AGI2009 Conference, which will be held on September 23rd and 24th in Stratford-Upon-Avon.

So get coding, and good luck!

Last month, we were happy to be able to go to Pittsburgh to cover the Game Education Summit, held at Carnegie Mellon’s Entertainment Technology Center. We got some nice interviews, including the conversation with ETC Pittsburgh Director Drew Davidson, which we featured on Episode 206 of the podcast. While I’m going to have another entry soon that will be specifically about some of my thoughts on the Game Education Summit, since I’ve gotten back, I’ve had to literally burn the midnight oil to get Virtual Morgantown looking and running the way I want it for this stage in the project. As I’ve been sitting here opening each model in SketchUp, cleaning up what I can, and exporting them to the XNA application as .X files (many, many thanks for Zbyl’s .X Exporter plugin!), I am continually reminded of the challenges in working at this scale after coming from a GIS background.

As you can zoom in and essentially immerse yourself at a nearly 1:1 scale in the virtual world, issues that never would have mattered suddenly become vital. Even Google Earth, World Wind, ArcGIS Explorer, any of the virtual globes aren’t really meant to be used at that scale, as their background imagery and 3D models look best from a viewpoint well above ground level. So, when you get down to the ground, and are actually representing real features, you have to give each one at least some individual attention. It’s often the opposite of the way most of us are trained. Rather than looking for commonalities and creating data layers that characterize those similarities, you have to bring out the aspects that might make a particular feature unique.

It’s a strange notion for a lot of geographers and GIS people, I think, to change their perspective from starting with a zoomed-out view of the world and then drilling down toward individual features to starting with the viewpoint of a single person in the world and then have to move and explore in order to identify and understand the nature of the virtual environment you’re immersed in. And, the more you’re drawn into the virtual world, the more obvious the individual differences become, and the more important it is for the creator of the simulation or interactive environment to pay attention to those small design details that help form a sense of actually experiencing the virtual world.

As I have progressed from childlike wonder and delight over my ability to create a simple XNA application with real-world terrain data, to relief when each one of my new functions actually builds and runs or when I get my model assets adjusted to just the right location and height, I am becoming even more of a believer in taking gaming technology and design seriously, and looking at how we can create virtual world applications that integrate aspects from many different areas, from gaming to GIS and geospatial to geography, and even history and other disciplines.

The same thing is true in the gaming world. There are commonly used interfaces and elements of design that are easily recognizable to gamers and, based on experience, they intuitively know how to interact with these UIs in different game environments. More importantly, these mechanisms for interaction help to enhance the sense of immersion within the virtual world. And that’s one of the key things I have to figure out for my own project: how to keep the user’s sense of being immersed in the virtual landscape, while still providing them with useful (I hope) information on the elements within that landscape.

So, what are some of the examples of interactive UI elements that I can employ? The simplest is for the user to navigate and explore the virtual world and, when he or she comes into close proximity of a particular feature that I want to give more information about, some piece of digital media will pop up. It might be a historical photo, a snippet of text information, an audio clip, whatever. The main thing is that this type of interaction is pretty passive; the user doesn’t have to do anything other than get to the spot where the media is located. This is close to the methods of spatializing multimedia we first tried in our research into extending traditional GIS interfaces a few years back, and various forms of embedded media are common now in web maps and virtual globes.

What I want to do, though, is get beyond that, and bring more dynamic interaction mechanisms from game design into my virtual world. For example, in RPGs (Role Playing Games), the typical interface is a series of menus that that give you access to various functions you can perform or status updates you can view. These menus do take you out of the virtual world briefly, since they pause the drawing of the graphics and slide the menu screens over the view, but experienced users can quickly scroll through options, perform tasks and return to the landscape view without losing their sense of immersion. As an RPG (really, Final Fantasy) fan myself, that’s the first example that comes to mind, but there are lots more interaction types that I want to consider. This diary entry is getting pretty long, though, so I’m going to save them for next time….

Via FlowingData