Archive for October, 2009
Augmented reality without the need to print
Viewable here without registration for next few days, but password’d after that so you’ll have to youtube it (no clip up yet)
Nice use of AR. Good that there’s no need to download / print. Looks like they’re detecting a rectangle rather than a specific $ bill so I’d imagine it would work with any piece of paper at that scale as well – but it would be good to test.
The better examples of AR don’t need the printed out code to work. Here’s one for lego from a year or so ago showing what’s in the box before you open it:
Means you can add deeper engagement using the existing manufacture process – good for any brand with a physical product.
0870 iPhone App saves users £267,000 in 2 weeks, and ebay app generates $400m in sales
This is another great example of a genuinely successful, useful iPhone app.
The 0870 app finds alternative, cheaper local numbers that connect to the same service (numbers with the national 0870 prefix cost more than local numbers). The app is free, but takes advertising, served through the AdMob ad server and sales house.
Simon Maddox, the app’s developer has gone public with some stats on his blog - essentially, in 2 weeks:
91,722 downloads
153,135 calls made
£267,987.54 saved (assuming a £0.35 saving per minute, and an average 5 minute call time)
Plus $680.82 in ad revenue.
So far then this hasn’t proved to be a major money-spinner for the developer, but it’s performing a great service for the users. It’s also fantastic that Simon is sharing the data.
More info at the Guardian’s Technology Blog.
Via @DanCall
Plus the ebay app has apparently generated $400m sales. Only 1% of their total $59.7bn sales, but impressive non the less. More here.
Helicopter Boyz
Helicopter Boyz, sponsored by Nikon, imagines what would happen if two kids were suited up in outfits covered in cameras. There’s lots of clever design work, though it appears that there is not any use of live camera images or live motion tracking in the final routine; as near as I can tell, it’s all choreographed in advance. That doesn’t make it any less clever or stylish. It does, however, suggest something unusual. Normally, people do cool, independent work that gets stolen by big agencies for companies like Nikon. Here, we have cool work that needs to get stolen and done in real-time, better, by the underground. Agreed? More.
VJing with the Half Life 2 Game Engine
“Games” are, at their heart, high-performance, real-time-optimized, interactive three-dimensional graphics engines. And that means that, by focusing on their live graphical capabilities, they can become incredibly advanced live visual instruments – the stuff of VJs and visualists.
A number of artists have put that to good use. Riley Harmon sends along his work with the Source Engine, the Valve-developed graphics engine behind the classic title Half Life 2 (and Team Fortress 2, Left 4 Dead, and the like). It’s an unusually well-balanced, solid engine that works really nicely, so a good choice. Here, it gets warped to new visual performance applications in a live set in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
Just what’s going on here, you ask? Riley explains:
Half-life 2 game engine, multiple scenes (levels) i pre-created and then showed up with my desktop. I used the mouse and keyboard to manually move things in beat with music and physics engine had an effect. Every once and while you’d see the console of the game (code) come up as I would change gravity and things like that. Next time I will map MIDI to the different things.
There are some Half Life 2 models making appearances there, as well, along with the brilliant Garry’s Mod -itself an ingenious experiment with the engine.
More.
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