Update

A long time since my last update, and a lot has happened. Alot.

Firstly here are my youtube Gizmondo AR examples...











Anyway,

The MAJOR thing that has happened in these weeks is that my project has been combined with Shu, who is doing AR cyberdice for primary school kids.

So, this Blog will be turning into my own personal blog hopefully focusing on my technical successes.

My Project Blog will now be

www.cyberdice.ubiscape.co.uk

Here we go...

Got the Giz-AR games

Finally caught up with my blogging... must keep this updated... not usually a blogger, but I can see how I could become of blogaholic.

So, I've finally downloaded those AR games.

Gizmondos!

Delayed Blog Writing:

Tuesday 3rd Feb

I got the gizmondos on tuesday, spent the day updating the software, and making minor alterations and cleaning the hardware. 12 gizmondos overall, 10 in perfect working order, one the sound doesnt work, and another that doesnt work altogether, but otherwise all in near perfect condition, Ebay "your amazing"... it was a steal... and thank you argos for accepting returns that actually are completely fine... :)


You can see the Giz-army above... though all have boxes there covered in an annoying feltly material which leaves stuff all on the console.

Some Gizmondo facts.

Released 2005.

CPU: Samsung ARM9 processor running at 400 MHz
Graphics: nVidia GeForce 3D 4500 128-bit 3D Graphics accelerator
RAM: 64MB
Communication: Bluetooth class 2 for multiplayer gaming, GSM tri-band
GPS
WAP 2.0
VGA (High Contrast) Camera 30fps

Oh... and the Gizmondo is limited edition... the company is dead since 2006

This piece of tech was branded "the worst console of all time" when infact its a great piece of hardware, designed by Rick Dickinson who was the in-house industrial designer of Sinclair Research Ltd. Just the worst company of all time...

So, after researching I've found that there were some un-released AR games floating about the internet... and found them on a very slow download will be finished soon I hope.

Meanwhile I've downloaded and run an AR demo created by Daniel Wagner.



Very smooth, even more so than any PC based stuff I've tried... The camera is great for reading the codes, and the ARtoolkit library is defiantly great at tracking. I will get in touch with Daniel Wagner later on in my development.

This morning I wrote some emails to Middlesex University Lansdown Centre, and got a response from Magnus Moar, who has offered to help shu and myself out. Consultation Monday PM.

Perfect...

Experimenting with ARTag

Delayed blog writing:

Monday 2nd Feb

Today the book Augmented Reality - A Practical Guide arrive in the post... delayed after a very snowy and icey couple of days. This book gives you an introduction into AR, and uses ARtag to explain and walk you through various examples of AR.

DISCOVERED: magic lens AR (this is what I will be doing)

Firstly, we went to http://www.artag.net/ and downloaded the example codes and AR library, with this we were able to quite easily run some applications to create AR

Here is the first test, a simple 2d image augmented on a printed out cybercode.


Here is an arrow augmented on an array of cybercodes which allow it to still be visible and the correct directed even if some are covered.


Augmented fish...


Here is an example of multiple augmentations. There is a simple code file which we edited to include one of our own images



Ordered a Gizmondo bundle for handheld AR...

Augmented Reality... Second experience

Delayed blog writing:

Sunday 1st Feb

Today I explored handheld AR, basically any device with a camera, a screen and a reasonable processing speed can be ultilised to perform AR. The most common platforms being PDAs, UMPCs, camera phones and some handheld games consoles.

I found an interesting website which demonstrated projects of handheld AR:

http://studierstube.icg.tu-graz.ac.at/handheld_ar/

Which is fantastic at outlining the various facets of AR interaction, and some of the projects that have been carried out are great, after seeing this I emailed Daniel Wagner the website's creator and a scientific leader in handheld AR, to which he replied.

"There is unfortunately very little tutorial material on AR in general. There is basically nothing about AR on mobile phones."

But a light at the end of that tunnel is he pointed me in the direction of his thesis on handheld AR, which at 150+ pages is quite a definitive guide... all thats next is learning to program... *cough*
I've also emailed metaio.com

FOUND: http://www.mikkoh.com/blog/?p=129 a nice little walk through of FLARtoolkit

Augmented Reality... First experience

Delayed blog writing:

Friday 30th Jan:

Today Shu and myself decided to explore what is out there in the world of AR. After searching the internet for hours and hours it quite surprising to find that AR has been quite freely available to develop in terms of code reading libraries for a number of years now.

ARtoolkit
ARtoolkitplus
ARtag

to name a few.

Found an interesting flash port of the ARtoolkit called FLARtoolkit... at www.boffswana.com there is a cool little flash AR example you can check out, as i did...

http://www.boffswana.com/news/?p=392

Also found an amazing piece of very stable software called BuildAR, which allows you to create your own AR by importing .obj files... which after looking for a plugin on solidworks allowed us to export 3d images.

Here's our first experience:



Here is a simple cube augmented on a cybercode, which is the default image from BuildAR.

BuildAR is found at http://www.hitlabnz.org/wiki/BuildAR

Also ordered some books from amazon.co.uk

Spatial Augmented Reality: A Modern Approach to Augmented Reality (1 week delivery)

Augmented Reality: A Practical Guide: The Complete Guide to Understanding and Using Augmented Reality Technology (4 days delivery)

Connected in an Ubiquitous computing landscape...

This blog will focus on ubiquitous computing, and the vessels for communication and information, object tracking (accountability), being constantly connected (possibly physically); though, through my blog I will be gearing myself up to creating something grown from my research, I want to take step back and not create another blackberry ducktaped together with the proverbial gizmo attached. I strive for the new, an angle I love is: the consumer of the inherently pointless plastic, rubber, metallic gizmos now could be moulded (I feel out of necessity) into consumers of information, though freedom can't be disregarded, but this would subsequently lead to a more knowledgeable society in a utopia, therefore it would come out of human choice. How? is a question I am studying, though its an argument that in certain sectors it is happening and has been for a while, like online video games, facebook, myspace, flickr, youtube etc... though in the current structure of home gizmo computers all consumers themselves (of energy) its notsustainable, information must have no detrimental impact on the physical world. To dust of a mild obsession from my youth; Pokemon without the cartridges, and masses of plush toys, cards and gizmo's is an example of the desire for information (data) virtual blogjects. No idea why but i wanted all those virtual creatures, I wasn't going to go in to field and catch real animals, or to the toystore and collect the plush toys, the data is what was important, and the minimal interaction you could have with 8bits, was great.

A perfect piece of technology I have is my old casio solar/battery calculator, does everything i want it too, got me through some sticky exam questions 10 years ago, and I'm still using it now, the sun is still there topping up the battery, and when the light is dim the battery is there, though i know that someday the battery will fail, it hasn't to date, and when it does I can replace it (though lithium isn't something you'd want in your compost). And yes its ABS and full of very dated electronics but it does fulfill its function, though a multi purpose wi-fi, bluetooth, RFID'd, processing, video processing, I can only imagine would need maybe one extra solar cell or battery, though in the future... Ubiquitous computing needs to embed as many casio fx-85WA's into walls and floors and tables everywhere, well not exactly... but the principle of it.

Another angle I want to look into is the sub-cultures that might stem from the ubiquitous computing age, using geocaching as an outline, I feel there is a chance of communities and cultures struggling against their privacy, to give an example a possible outcome is the creator
keeping information for a certain group or him/herself, ubiquitous computing by nature is desiring this information, secrecy of information will form quite diverse and interesting communal structures, it will almost certainly involve its own ubiquitous system of privacy. Still getting my head around it, and what I'm trying to articulate.

For me, the future of a product designer isn't creating a singular thing, but a system of things, emotion, interaction & data that are harmonious with each other and their environment.