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English Toyota Camatte and augmented reality at Tokyo Toy Show!
From the 19th to the 21st of June was the 2015 Tokyo Toy Show, and there were also some projects dedicated to augmented reality; the Toyota Camatte particularly stood out.
For a so innovative project, it was just matter of time before the use of one of the most avantgarde technologies, augmented reality; in fact from this Toy Show edition, Toyota thought to an easier and more spectacular way to customize the Camatte: the first thing to do is to sit in the car and take a picture, then, through the Camatte Vision app and a tablet, the kids can chose the look of the car, mixing and matching 13 types of body and 12 colors and also to see a rendering of their customized car run on a (true) miniature course with their family onboard!
The project Camatte was launched in 2012 to interest the kids to the automotive world, getting them used to driving and showing them the joy of owning a car. The car company, so, created a little car, complete in every part and fully working, that can be drove by kids with the help of the parents and also easily customizable on the basis of the children’s imagination. So green lights to pink cars, hot dog trucks and purple fire engines!
The actual version of Camatte is called Hajime, a word that means “beginning”, but it’s not really the first one: from 2012 Toyota presented six other models (Sora, Daichi, Takumi, 57s and 57s Sports), all working like true cars. At this Tokyo Toy Show it wasn’t possible to drive the model, but the families had the possibility to sit inside to take the picture to modify with the app.
The name of the car and the project was “Camatte” not just without reason but because this word in japanese means “care” and it’s intended as “taking care of others” and, of course, “taking care of the car”.
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HoloLens and NASA take augmented reality to space!
Microsoft’s HoloLens reaches the augmented reality news again, this time taking us to space.
The famous headset will be used to help NASA Astronauts during the missions out of Earth: they will test the gadget straight away aboard the International Space Station as part of Project Sidekick, a project that will enhance astronauts work and life, especially in the fields of training and task efficiency, through the availability of assistance when and where they need it.
HoloLens, infact, used in “Remote Expert Mode”, will make it possible to connect an expert on Earth via Skype with the wearer: the controller will see what the astronaut is seeing and so will be able to help with maintenance and problems. Since in space the connection isn’t always at its best and often delayed , the headset will also operate in “Procedure Mode”, with local instructions and videos that will help solve the main problems immediately.
“HoloLens and other virtual and mixed reality devices are cutting edge technologies that could help drive future exploration and provide new capabilities to the men and women conducting critical science on the International Space Station,” Sam Scimemi, director of the ISS program, said in a statement. “This new technology could also empower future explorers requiring greater autonomy on the journey to Mars.”
Microsoft HoloLens will be tested in two different times and modalities:
– one headset has just departed June 28, with the SpaceX’s seventh commercial resupply mission to the International Space Station; the astronauts will be able to try it and see its potentialities.
– HoloLens will be tested also during NEEMO (Extreme Environment Mission Operations) expedition 20, starting July 21, where they will be tried for two weeks in the world’s only undersea research station, Aquarius, by a team of astronauts and engineers.
Here you can see the first tests of the Sidekick Project:
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Playmation: Disney and Hasbro revolutionize the toys’ world with augmented reality mechanisms
Its name is Playmation and it is the new project by Disney and Hasbro together to give the kids a new way of playing and enjoying their favorite characters. How? With a kind of augmented reality mechanism!
Playmation kits will be composed of wearable toys, that will immerse the kids in missions occurring in the real world thanks to infrared technology, gestures recognition and radio frequencies. A voice will guide them towards the game goals as they are the true main characters and, as the mission will be completed, the little players will find themselves face to face with the enemy boss, fighting him as true super heroes thanks to the equipment, that will vibrate and make them feel they have superpowers.
The enemies will be little action figures to put on some special bases and they will interact in the game thanks to the equipment. The missions, Disney assures, will be all in the real life, so it will be a good method to end the bad habit of passing too many hours in front of a screen or playing with mobile devices.
Senior vice president of strategy and business development at Disney Consumer Products, Kareem Daniel said “We use digital technology to make active physical play more exciting for kids. Parents believe technology is becoming a natural part of kids’ lives, but at the same time most parents are nostalgic about how active they were when they played growing up. Kids love to play make-believe and become super heroes, and Playmation offers lots of different ways to play.”
The first announced kit, as we can read on Playmation official site, will be the one dedicated to Marvel’s Avengers, that will be out next fall. In 2016 it will be the turn of Star Wars, then in 2017 we’ll see the Frozen one.
The Avengers’ kit for now will have 25 missions, but surely it will be expanded thanks to the updating that technology and apps make possible.
Now that the article is ended, confess: how many adults are thinking of buying these kits for themselves? 😉
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Smart Specs: the headset that will give the sight to legally blind
Thanks to a startup called VA-ST and the neuroscience researcher Stephen Hicks, Augmented Reality will become the technology through which legally blind will be able to see again.
Day after day, month after month, we are getting used to the fact that in the future Augmented and Virtual Reality headsets will be very common: they will help us see reality in a pretty enhanced way, with more information and possibility to interact; but what about those who can’t see? It would seem impossible for them to use this new technology, but we are wrong and a pair of smart glasses called Smart Specs demonstrates it.
How will Smart Specs work?
Often people who are defined as legally blind still have some kind of vision, just not good enough to pick out any obstacles or faces. Thanks to this Augmented Reality headset they’ll be able to use fully their remaining sight, since it will help them with an enhancement of depth perception.
As Stephen Hicks declared: “We turn [the image] into a high-contrast cartoon that we then present on the inside of a see-through pair of glasses. We can then add the person’s normal vision to the enhanced view, and allow the person to use their remaining sight as they generally would do to see the world in a better way.”
The Smart Specs use three-dimensional cameras and detect the structure and position of nearby objects and through Augmented Reality they put them in the real world. This will make possible for legally blind to avoid obstacles and actually see what’s around them. People suffering from cloudy vision, patches of lost sight in the centre, tunnel vision or night blindness might get help from this project.
At the moment Smart Specs are just a prototype: they feature, inside a plastic headset, a pair of Epson Moverio augmented-reality glasses as display and an Asus component to analyze depth, and they have to be strapped to the head of the person, who has to carry also a box to change the settings. This is, of course, just the first version of the headset, that is meant to be available soon in the cunsomer version at about $1000.
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HoloLens in action with Minecraft at E3: Microsoft amazes the gamers
At the Microsoft keynote from the E3 2015 press conference, that took place in Los Angeles just few days ago, Microsoft presented a long awaited preview of the famous game Minecraft played with HoloLens.
In fact, it was already known that Microsoft and Mojang were developing a version of Minecraft for the augmented reality headset HoloLens, and, as expected, they decided to give a spectacular proof of the potentialities of the game and the headset together.
In front of the E3 public, Microsoft’s Phil Spencer presented the special version of the game with HoloLens in action.
As first thing, the sandbox version of the game, thanks to augmented reality, can be played wherever: in the video you will see that, with just only a vocal command, a complete, playable Minecraft world appeared on a table. The stability of the hologram, even while the man was moving around, remained perfect, as well as the visibility of the objects. The view was perfect even zooming closer, so much to see inside the buildings.
There was a moment when the presenter wanted to follow another player in the game: the vision zoomed on the player and smoothly started to follow the character.
The commands to interact with the game are just the voice or the Microsoft’s “air tap” gesture where you raise your index finger and tap down, but there’s the possibility of using also the typical controller.
The news are many and the public was very happy of these new features; HoloLens is waiting to be out around January 2016 with the special Minecraft version at a very affordable price.
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“Clandestine: Anomaly”: the new augmented mobile videogame will be out in a few days
Often new technologies linked to Augmenter Reality, from wearables to headsets, to apps, start from a crowdfunding campaing on sites such as Kickstarter to find the initial funds and become reality. We talked of some very famous cases that had a lot of success, but it’s not the same for everyone: for a limited number of ambitious projects that the web decides to fund, there are hundreds that don’t even have a chance to start. However, this doesn’t mean that the project will never come to life or have success in some other way.
This is the case of “Clandestine: Anomaly“, mobile videogame that, on the style of Ingress, turns the world around us into a set of a sci-fi battle between factions. Despite the Kickstarted campaing didn’t have success, and so had to be interrupted, ZenFri’s creatives didn’t give up and found other ways.
So, right in these days, they announced the release of this new augmented videogame that will see us as main characters in a war between the planets. Essentially, an alien ship smacked in our zone, miraculously leaving our house untouched; from that moment our smartphone will receive signals and we’ll be part of a sci-fi war that will take place in the place we know, the ones where we lived and maybe we even grew up.
This is the officiale synopsis, from the site: “After your phone is hacked by mysterious and advanced alien technology, you are thrust into the middle of an inter-galactic war. Though you possess no training, no experience, zero authorization and no skills that can help you navigate through the interstellar struggle, your involvement is paramount to deciphering the clues in your immediate area and beyond. Unraveling a multi-dimensional mystery, it’s up to you to act.”
“Clandestine: Anomaly” is developed by ZenFri and will be launched this month in the iOS version; there’s not yet an official date for Android, but it seems it will be very soon.
Here the official trailer:
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“Visual Shazam”: the music recognition app hits the world of Augmented Reality
You enter a cafè and the background song is not new to you, but a memory lapse is preventing you from remember title and singer. It’s on the tip of your tongue, but it seems impossible to recall it. How to do? Of course turning on Shazam, the mobile app that recognizes music. But what if you want to know more about a place or maybe a painting? From now you can use Shazam for this too.
The news came out at the beginning of the year: the Shazam Team was working on a new feature to recognize not only music but objects too. Now this function is reality thanks to its latest update: the famous music recognition app now can read objects, QR codes, products and advertising through our smartphones’ camera.
Basically it will be possible, wherever Shazam’s logo will be visible, to just focus the product and open links to related pages or to see special contents created with Augmented Reality appear; this new feature is called “Visual Shazam” and it’s available in free download for iPhone and iPad.
The Londoner company for the occasion partnered with some important brands, as Time, Condé Nast , Levi’s, Guerlain, Hearst, Harper Collins and, last but not least, with Disney for the promotion of their new movie, “Tomorrowland.”
Moreover, the company wants to adapt this new technology to the world of wearables, e.g. smartwatches.
What for Shazam is a news, for Experenti has been reality for some time: it’s called Experiential Marketing and it’s the field in which we are specialized from many years, connecting Marketing strategies to Augmented Reality. You want to try yourself the technologies we are talking about? You just need our app (freely available for Android and iOS), a smartphone and our Media Kit: focus our material and be prepared for the surprise 😉
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Apple Inc. efforts on Augmented Reality: iOS 9 Proactive feature and the acquisition of Metaio
During last days, Apple Inc. was on the lips of all Augmented Reality fans thanks to some news related to this famous new technology.
It’s not a news the competition between Google and Apple, especially when it is about the voice based search components: if Google owns the powerful Google Now (about which has been announced an enhancement soon at Google I/O conference few days ago), Apple unveiled a new feature they’re working on. The feature is called Proactive and it is expected to come with iOS 9: it will replace, or become part of, the traditional Spotlight search menu and it will be fully integrated with Siri, Contacts, Maps, Calendars, Passbook and more. Ok, but what about Augmented Reality? Rumors say that Proactive will not just be integrated with Apple Maps, but it will show them in augmented mode: it seems that in few years, maybe months, all the iPhone owners will be used to 3D maps and to know a lot more of useful information that will be showed on them through a feature called “Browse Around me” .
As we said, these are rumors and everything could change suddenly; but another news that came out lately seems to confirm what we heard. Few days ago, Apple acquired the German company Metaio: they are the developers of an important Augmented Reality Software that uses a particular language called AREL (AR Experience Language) and that provides the tools for other developers to produce augmented experiences within their own apps. It is used especially for developing travel-related companies apps.
To give a better idea, these are two examples of works done using the Metaio software:
– The Berlin TimeTraveller App
Proactive + Metaio: these news gives a pretty clear suggestion of the direction that Apple, even if in late compared to other big companies, is taking. Now we can only wait and see what happens, but surely it will not be long.
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Oculus Rift and Surreal Vision together: a step towards Augmented Reality
Surely all you reading right now know what Oculus Rift is, but how many have an answer when we say Surreal Vision? Well, now these two realities are definitely linked: the Facebook-owned virtual reality firm, Oculus Research, few days ago announced on their blog that the Surreal Vision team joined them.
Surreal Vision is a UK-based start-up that develops software for “real-time 3D scene reconstruction”: saying it with other words, they accurately represent the real world in the virtual one or, also, they recreate it in a virtual space, blending them together. This incredible mix reveals a step towards Augmented Reality from the Oculus company, until now devoted to the world of Virtual Reality: the reconstruction of the world around the person wearing the headset will help knowing when there’s an obstacle on the way, but will also bring outside objects and landscapes into games. We could call this a kind of inverted Augmented Reality. All this will be possible integrating in the headset Oculus Rift the software created by Surreal Vision, called SLAM++.
Since we are talking about this, in the last hours another Oculus Rift related news popped out: finally the Oculus company CEO Brendan Iribe gave a release price to the world, announcing that the headset will cost $1,500. Thinking about the prices we know from other headsets, this seems a bit out of range, but don’t be scared: at first the price seems really high, but then, if you read the statement, you see that he said that would be the total price of the Oculus and a powerful enough pc to run it. This will not obviously affect the videogames players, that already have powerful machines, but for the average computer user this could be something to keep in mind.
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