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London design firm Berg and the London office of the Japanese ad agency Dentsu have announced a line of augmented reality toys called Suwappu. The little figurines have swappable heads and bodies; depending on how they're configured, they interact differently and draw different environments for themselves in the augmented reality world.

"Ingress, the Alternate/Augmented Reality (AR) game from Google's Niantic Labs, is a major evolution of mobile gaming. Apparently, it's also a good way to get arrested. According to a post on Reddit (I know, I know - but stay with me on this), an Ingress player in Ohio was detained by police for his in-game actions. Specifically, he was "hacking a portal" near a police station. His phone had technical difficulties, which led him to linger by the portal/police station for a bit, catching the eye of local law enforcement and leading to the detention. After the original post, other Ingress players responded with similar stories. One aroused suspicions by wandering around an empty parking lot at night. Another, trying to hack a portal next to an air traffic control station, had to run from the local sheriff. A third was called in for questioning after hacking a portal outside of a "high-traffic drug area.""

Interesting applications of augmented reality in the art world.

Microsoft Research Cambridge team built an augmented reality system to help brain surgeons visualize 3D brain scans.

"According to their writeup, Disney has partnered with a company called Jaxx to create a line of toys that can be recognized by phone or tablet apps, then trigger animations based on Disney's movies or other properties. In the example seen by Reuters, pointing an iPad camera at a set of Little Mermaid-branded bongo drums will cause the crab Sebastian to come on-screen and perform a song by "playing" them. Specific animations could also be used to sell the products in stores, like an animated Tinkerbell who flies out of her box when shoppers look at her with a smartphone camera."

Ingress, Google's innovative augmented reality game, has launched on Apple's iPhone, iPad and iPod touch, having previously only been available for Android.

augmented reality done right

weekly 12.10

"The big highlight is that Google will be building a version of Chrome especially for use inside virtual reality. The browser will be coming later this year. Oculus launched a browser for the Gear VR in its most recent big software update, though Daydream's option seems to take advantage of some of the strengths of Chrome, like bookmarks and history. The company has already brought WebVR to mobile and desktop Chrome. They showed off WebVR Experiments last month to bring bite-size experiences to VR on Daydream and Cardboard. Google gave some light details on bringing Chrome to augmented reality situations, as well, so that users can bring their outside world into the browser. This will allow people shopping for a coffee table on Amazon's mobile app to scan their room and see what the right size would be. The update will be launching today on an experimental build of Chromium."

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France-based Augment is hoping to make AR a useful sales tool for allowing consumers to see how products will look before they commit to buying.