“coralline” earlier this year, pedestrians who stopped in front of special window displays saw their reflections with their eyes transformed into buttons.But this year was a "real tipping point" for augmented reality, said Greg Davis, general manager for North America at Total Immersion. "We've seen it proliferate onto multiple screens, computers and mobile screens, in home and out of home."
Earlier this year, Total Immersion created baseball trading cards for topps co that, when held in front of a webcam, make a three-dimensional avatar of the player appear on-screen. It also designed product tie-ins for the film “Avatar” for Mc Donald’s and Mattel, with technology embedded in Big Mac packages and action figures that makes animated 3-D landscapes and characters come to life when scanned by a webcam.
These consumer-oriented applications are possible because webcams are a standard feature of most new desktop and laptop computers. The software in the applications also works with current Web browsers and does not require a cumbersome download.
The next wave of new programs likely will be for smart phones. The growth in third-party applications for mobile software platforms such as Apples iphone independent developers can experiment with augmented reality.
"You've not got just whatever Nokia is can dream, but potentially thousands of people thinking, 'What can I do with this?' " said Jackie Fenn, vice president and research fellow at Gartner. "In the same way we had a flurry of innovation around Google Maps and things you can do with that, we'll get a similar flood of innovation in these applications over the next year."
Yelp launched an augmented reality application for the iPhone 3GS this year called Monocle. When a user holds a phone's camera to view a city street, information about nearby businesses pops up on the screen. Yelp developers started working on Monocle after the launch of the newest iPhone, which had the compass, camera, large display and other features necessary to handle the application.
"We've learned that it's really hard to do this well," said Yelp product manager Eric Singley. "A lot of people are jumping into the game. They find there's a level of polish that needs to happen ... otherwise, it's confusing, messy and jarring."
source : http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/chi-tc-biz-cover2cp-tech-1223dec23,0,5400563.story
