LAS VEGAS, CES 2012 – Remember the days before you had an iPhone and played games outside? Using sticks for swords and your hand as a gun? I bet you spent hours outdoors pretending you were some movie superhero trying to rescue Julia Roberts from a a plague of mutant zombie pandas. Then you got into video game consoles and iPhone games and your imagination just went in the toilet. Well, AppGear is here to bring back the nostalgia for your youth and make alien invasions a (virtual) reality.
Open up the App Store on your iPhone and you’ll find a plethora of apps that introduce augmented reality to your iPhone, but for now, that’s the only way you can get it. Apple is yet to make augmented reality a native feature, but a recently discovered patent application suggests the technology could one day appear in the built-in Maps app for iOS.
Qualcomm launched its augmented reality SDK for iOS yesterday, allowing app developers to create impressive augmented reality apps for our devices. While augmented reality is nothing new to iOS, Qualcomm’s SDK should mean more AR apps in the App Store because it makes it easier for developers to create apps for a number of different platforms.
It’s no secret that the iPad 2 should open the floodgates of the augmented reality experience — and here’s another example of what the iPad 2 can do with AR.
No doubt in anticipation of Yuri’s Night, Vito Technology has just released an AR-equipped version of their venerable star-watching iPad app, Star Walk ($5). Just hold the screen up to the sky and the app will superimpose constellations and all sorts of other info onto a realtime image of the sky being viewed through the iPad 2’s camera. And that’s on top of all the other cool features, like a satellite tracker, night mode and a time-machine function that lets you see what the sky looks like on any given day or time.
Still saving for an iPad 2? That’s ok, the iPhone version has the same features (but not the awesomeness of the iPad’s giant screen), and it’s on sale for a buck till April 12 — which, not coincidentally, is Yuri’s Night.
Daily coupon upstarts like Groupon and Living Social have become so massively popular that it’s gotta be increasingly difficult for older and more fogey-ish coupon flingers like Valpak to keep up.
So what Valpak has done is team up with the Junaio augmented reality app to provide an AR channel for Valpak deals in the area. Which is cool, because since Junaio is location based, rather than flip through Valpak’s iPhone app (yeah, they have an iPhone app now too) any potential coupon would just pop up on the screen when standing right outside the store.
Unfortunately, Valpak still seems to have retained its stodgy image; a pity, because the deals are actually pretty good. The Junaio channel’s a start though.
Think the big deal with the iPad 2’s rear-facing camera is all about snapshots and videos? Think again.
The augmented reality gurus over at Metaio sound pretty darn excited about the new iPad 2 for two key reasons. The first is obvious: it has a much larger screen, which makes the iPad much more useful for, say, mixed-reality games than the iPhone ever was. The second ingredient is the iPad 2’s new, explosively fast dual-core A5 processor.
What with Apple and TV both as American as pecan pie (which, ironically, is actually way more American than apple pie), you’d think the U.S. would have a chokehold on TV-iPhone innovation. Nope — besides Al-Jazeera now streaming live news on the iPhone for free, last week Germans had a chance to watch and interact with the world’s first augmented-reality TV show.
Viewers of Galileo, a quiz show that airs on the German ProSieben channel, were able to interact with the questions on the TV screen by viewing and interacting with augmented reality versions of the questions on their iPhone screens, courtesy of augmented-reality app Junaio (For a visual demo, suffer through a short ad and watch the cute video). Not to worry though — Metaio, the German-based developer that makes Junaio, says similar stuff is on it’s way to the U.S. soon. Fantastisch!
Boom boom, pow — the Black Eyed Peas, already one of the most cutting-edge bands to rock an iPod, may just have made music videos so two-thousand-and-late. That’s because they released an app today that includes a stunning, immersive 360-degree, augmented-reality enabled music video that sticks you in the middle of the action with the ability to pan around and become part of the action. And guess what — it’s only available on the iPhone, with no plans announced yet to make it available for any other platform.
Considering the depths that Apple fans will plump into a new version of iOS even before it’s released — let alone a month later — we’re amazed to hear that developers are still stumbling upon new features of iOS 4.2… especially when those features are as buzzworthy as augmented reality. Yet that’s just what Occipital has discovered lurking in the firmware of Apple’s latest iteration of its popular mobile operating system.
Bargain-hunting just got more interesting — Metaio has added yet another augmented-reality channel to their AR iPhone app, Junaio. This time they’ve partnered with eBay and created a channel that lets users scan their surroundings for deals in eBay Classifieds, itself a newish, local version of eBay.
It works just like any other Junaio channel; looking around through the iPhone with the eBay channel switched on will, in this case, display local eBay Classifieds listings — apartment buildings will show unit listings superimposed, shops might show discounted stuff available, etc. The channel is also searchable by keyword.
![AppGear’s Elite Command AR Fills Your Home With Invading Alien Hordes! [CES 2012]](http://cdn.cultofmac.com/wp-content/plugins/lazy-load/images/1x1.trans.gif "CESBug")
LAS VEGAS, CES 2012 – Remember the days before you had an iPhone and played games outside? Using sticks for swords and your hand as a gun? I bet you spent hours outdoors pretending you were some movie superhero trying to rescue Julia Roberts from a a plague of mutant zombie pandas. Then you got into video game consoles and iPhone games and your imagination just went in the toilet. Well, AppGear is here to bring back the nostalgia for your youth and make alien invasions a (virtual) reality.
