Microsoft’s new HoloLens project has shown the tech world where the future of augmented reality might lead, and according to a Wall Street analyst, Apple is making moves to catch up with its own AR product.
Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster reports that Apple has poached Microsoft’s lead HoloLens audio engineer — and that there are other signs Cupertino is assembling an AR team.
Apple has finalized an acquisition for the augmented reality company Metaio in a move that could soon bring the German firm’s AR tech to iOS and other Apple devices.
Metaio, which specializes in creating augmented reality tools for other businesses as well as other computer vision solutions, mysteriously announced last night that it would stop selling its services, but filings with the German government reveal that the company has transferred all of its shares over to Apple.
Take a look at their incredible tech in action:
Doctors in Germany have just used an iPad to operate on some guy’s liver, not by smashing the screen and using the jagged shards as a scalpel, but by using Apple’s tablet as a second-screen for an augmented reality app. Will wonders never cease? Is there anything the iPad can’t do?
Orbotix’s robotic ball, Sphero, has gotten so popular over the past two years, even Obama has been spotted driving one around, but it’s finally getting an upgrade, as Orbotix has just announced Sphero 2.0 will launch later this month.
One of the most hopeful promises of augmented reality is that it will eventually help us understand the world immediately around us. I’ve always thought one of the best uses of AR technology in this respect was its application to cars: Pan your phone or tablet across an engine bay, for instance, and an AR app will tell you where to put oil or coolant, or which bolts to remove in order to access the battery.
Audi brought us a little closer to this (augmented) reality today with the release of an AR companion app, using technology from German-based AR powerhouse Metaio, for its entry-level A3 that explains features in the cabin and engine bay.
Back In The Day™, when men were men, cars were cars and boys were forced to work to support their families before their stupid brains were even half developed, we fixed automobiles by kicking their tires and sucking our teeth.
Fast forward to the Space Year 2013 and cars now repair themselves. All you have to do is take it to a repair shop, where they plug it into a computer which sucks the money from your bank account while you take a spin in a “courtesy” car.
But what if you want to tinker? If you own a Ford and an iPad, and don’t mind getting your hands (literally) dirty, then you’ll be happy to hear that there’s a (concept) app for that.
A new smartphone service launched today by the British Heart Foundation uses augmented reality to transform a packet of cigarettes into luxury items in an effort to help you quit smoking.
Using the Blippar app for Android and iOS, the service encourages you to “swap fags for swag” (“fag” is a British term for cigarette) by virtually transforming your cigarettes into other items you could afford if you didn’t spend your cash on smokes.
There’s this really cool, funny, slick video made by a bunch of Israelis called Sight, in which a guy walks around in a world where everything he sees is overlayed by augmented reality. Everything. All the time. Sounds far-fetched? Not so much anymore.
Today, Metaio announced that their new augmented-reality chip, called the Metaio AREngine, will make its debut in ST-Ericsson phones — in a handset(s) that may be available to the public as soon as the end of this year, or early 2014 if things move more slowly.
LAS VEGAS, CES 2013 – Back when I was a kid, I had all kinds of Fisher-Price toys I loved playing with. But I don’t think I remember anything quite as magic as Fisher-Price’s new line of Apptivity sets for preschoolers that combine child-safe cases and toy figures with slick augmented-reality apps (though my little Classic Xylophone came close).
C’mon, who among us hasn’t snapped a photo on Instagram and thought “wow, that’d look great on my wall” — I know I have. So Art.com came up with Photos to Art, a slick app that painlessly, almost magically transform your digital snapshot into a piece of art — all you need to provide is some money and a bit of imagination (and they’ll even help you with that last one).
I’ve never really been able to get behind the whole augmented reality thing. I tried it with the Yelp iPhone app once while I was on vacation in a large city, but it hasn’t really changed my life in any way. If there’s any platform I can see augmented reality really taking off, it’s on smartphones.
The developers at Crossfader have released something really cool: an augmented reality layer for Maps on the iPhone. Both Apple and Google Maps are supported, and the app itself is totally free.
You’ve seen Stephen Spielberg’s film, Minority Report, right? Tom Cruise’s character stands in front of virtual screens, puts on a pair of gloves, and manipulates the data and the memories without touching a thing. Well, the super brains at MIT’s media lab have taken the first step toward that reality, using Apple’s magical device as a display screen and a special glove/attachment combo to interact with it.
The video the group has released shows some pretty fancy stuff, drawing objects in 3D real time, and then manipulating them in collaboration with others. There’s even some slick Minority Report-style interface there, with researches moving red and blue rectangles around in the virtual space they’ve created on the iPad.
If you were a sports fan growing up, chances are you stopped by your local fair or amusement park to have your photo superimposed onto the cover of Sports Illustrated. Our desire to join the ranks of sports celebrities hasn’t changed much over the years, but the technology used for sports photo novelties has. For the first time ever in the NFL, the New York Giants invite fans to try on their Super Bowl ring using augmented reality.
BARCELONA, MOBILE WORLD CONGRESS 2012 — When I first spotted the Aurasma booth, I thought it was yet another annoying app to serve ads on top of the real world, using augmented reality. And it actually is. Only before I could walk away, I got caught by the enthusiastic marketing folks and found out that the app is actually very cool indeed.
Aurasma is a kind of cross between augmented reality and Instagram. It works like this: You point the app at anything: a painting, a product package, a building, and Aurasma will remember it. You then pick a video or photo or a 3-D rendering to show up over that real-world scene whenever you point your iPhone’s camera at it again.
Imagine buying a paper magazine (remember those?), only instead of pages it just has a cover and a hole in the middle. Into this hole you place your iPad, which you then use to read the magazine’s contents. Useless, right? But that’s (almost) exactly what Hasbro has done in a desperate attempt to bring its board games into the 21st century.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nAvPrZePEd4
SAN FRANCISCO, MACWORLD / iWORLD 2012 — Next time you’re nodding off at school or in the office because there’s too much C02 in the room, a sensor can open the window and wake you up.
This is just one of the cool functions that a group of uber-smart high school students and an affable professor have designed through virtual reality in Hawaii.
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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9txpbfDbq6I&feature=youtu.be
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.
