Hasta La Gadget!

Forget about 20/20. “Perfect” vision could be redefined by gadgets that give you the eyes of a cyborg.

The tech industry calls the digital enrichment of the physical world “augmented reality.” Such technology is already appearing in smartphones and toys, and enthusiasts dream of a pair of glasses we could don to enhance our everyday perception. But why stop there?

Scientists, eye surgeons, professors and students at the University of Washington have been developing a contact lens containing one built-in LED, powered wirelessly with radio frequency waves.

Eventually, more advanced versions of the lens could be used to provide a wealth of information, such as virtual captions scrolling beneath every person or object you see. Significantly, it could also be used to monitor your own vital signs, such as body temperature and blood glucose level.

Why a contact lens? The surface of the eye contains enough data about the body to perform personal health monitoring, according to Babak Parvis, a University of Washington professor of bionanotechnology, who is working on the project.

“The eye is our little door into the body,” Parvis told Wired.com.

With gadgets becoming increasingly mobile and powerful, the technology industry is seeing a steady stream of applications devoted to health. A few examples include a cellphone microscope used to diagnose malaria, surgeons honing their skills with the Nintendo Wiimote, and an iPhone app made for diabetes patients to track their glucose levels.

A contact lens with augmented-reality powers would take personal health monitoring several steps further, Parvis said, because the surface of the eye can be used to measure much of the data you would read from your blood tests, including cholesterol, sodium, potassium and glucose levels.

And that’s just the beginning. Because this sort of real-time health monitoring has been impossible in the past, there’s likely more about the human eye we haven’t yet discovered, Parvis said. And beyond personal health monitoring, this finger-tip sized gadget could one day create a new interface for gaming, social networking and, well, interacting with reality in general.

Parvis and his colleagues have been working on their multipurpose lens since 2004. They integrated miniature antennas, control circuits, an LED and radio chips into the lens using optoelectronic components they built from scratch. They hope these components will eventually include hundreds of LEDs to display images in front of the eye. Think words, charts and even photographs. (The illustration above is a concept image showing what it would look like with the lens displaying a digital overlay of the letter E.)

Sounds neat, doesn’t it? But the group faces a number of challenges before achieving true augmented eye vision.

First and foremost, safety is a prime concern with a device that comes in contact with the eye. To ensure the lens is safe to wear, the group has been testing prototypes on live rabbits (pictured to the right), who have successfully worn the lenses for 20 minutes at a time with no adverse effects. However, the lens must undergo much more testing before gaining approval from the Food and Drug Administration.

A fundamental challenge this contact lens will face is the task of tracking the human eye, said Blair MacIntyre, an associate professor and director of the augmented environments lab at Georgia Tech College of Computing. MacIntyre is not involved in the contact lens product, but he helped develop an augmented-reality zombie shooter game.

“These developments are obviously very far from being usable, but very exciting,” MacIntyre said. “Using them for AR will be very hard. You need to know exactly where the user is looking if you want to render graphics that line up with the world, especially when their eyes saccade (jump around), which our eyes do at a very high rate.”

Given that obstacle, we’re more likely to see wearable augmented-reality eyeware in the form of glasses before a contact lens, MacIntyre said. With glasses, we’ll only need to track where the glasses are and where the eyes are relative to them as opposed to where the eyes are actually looking.

And with a contact lens, it will be difficult to cram heavy computational power into such a small device, even with today’s state-of-the-art technologies, Parvis admits. There are many advanced sensors that would amplify the lens’ abilities, but the difficulty lies in integrating them, which is why Parvis and his colleagues have had to engineer their own components. And when the contact lens evolves from personal health monitoring into more processor-intense augmented-reality applications, it’s more likely it will have to draw its powers from a companion device such as a smartphone, he said.

Layar, an Amsterdam-based startup focusing on augmented reality, shares University of Washington’s vision of an augmented-reality contact lens. However, Raimo van der Klein, CEO of Layar, said such a device’s vision would be limited if it did not work with an open platform supporting every type of data available via the web, such as mapping information, restaurant reviews or even Twitter feeds. Hence, his company has taken a first step by releasing an augmented-reality browser for Google Android smartphones, for which software developers can provide “layers” of data for various web services.

Van der Klein believes a consumer-oriented, multipurpose lens is just one example of where augmented-reality technology will take form in the near future. He said to expect these applications to move beyond augmenting vision and expand to other parts of the body.

“Imagine audio cues through an earpiece or sneakers vibrating wherever your friends are,” van der Klein said. “We need to keep an open eye for future possibilities, and I think a contact lens is just part of it.”

See Also:

• At the Dawn of the Augmented Reality Industry
• Augmented Reality Flashlight
• Augmented Reality: Kooaba
• Augmented Reality glitches
• How it Works: Augmented Reality
• If You’re Not Seeing Data, You’re Not Seeing

Photos: University of Washington

While some may say that price isn’t the main factor that’s been holding HMDs back from mass acceptance, France’s Optinvent (a spin-off of Thomson S.A.) is apparently of that opinion, and it’s now promising to deliver a full-fledged HMD for less than $200 by the end of next year. In addition to their trend-setting good looks (to be further refined in the final version), the company’s so-called Clear Vu goggles make use of a reflection system that displays images in the wearer’s field of vision rather than completely obstructing it, which the company says opens to the door a whole host of augmented reality possibilities — like heads-up GPS directions, for instance. Unfortunately, the company isn’t offering much in the way of actual specs just yet, although it does say the goggles will display an image size equivalent to a 71-inch TV placed 2.5 meters away.

Filed under: Displays, Wearables

Optinvent promises to offer Clear Vu HMD for less than $200 originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 02 Sep 2009 19:02:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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As you shove your way through the crowd in a baseball stadium, the lenses of your digital glasses display the names, hometowns and favorite hobbies of the strangers surrounding you. Then you claim a seat and fix your attention on the batter, and his player statistics pop up in a transparent box in the corner of your field of vision.

It’s not possible today, but the emergence of more powerful, media-centric cellphones is accelerating humanity toward this vision of “augmented reality,” where data from the network overlays your view of the real world. Already, developers are creating augmented reality applications and games for a variety of smartphones, so your phone’s screen shows the real world overlaid with additional information such as the location of subway entrances, the price of houses, or Twitter messages that have been posted nearby. And publishers, moviemakers and toymakers have embraced a version of the technology to enhance their products and advertising campaigns.

“Augmented reality is the ultimate interface to a computer because our lives are becoming more mobile,” said Tobias Höllerer, an associate professor of computer science at UC Santa Barbara, who is leading the university’s augmented reality program. “We’re getting more and more away from a desktop, but the information the computer possesses is applicable in the physical world.”

Tom Caudell, a researcher at aircraft manufacturer Boeing, coined the term “augmented reality” in 1990. He applied the term to a head-mounted digital display that guided workers through assembling electrical wires in aircrafts. The early definition of augmented reality, then, was an intersection between virtual and physical reality, where digital visuals are blended in to the real world to enhance our perceptions.

Futurists and computer scientists continue to raise their standards for a perfectly augmented world. Höllerer’s dream for augmented reality is for it to reach a state in which it does not rely on a pre-downloaded model to generate information. That is, he wants to be able to point a phone at a city it’s completely unfamiliar with, download the surroundings and output information on the fly. He and his peers at UCSB call this idea “Anywhere Augmentation.”

But we have a long way to go — perhaps several years — before achieving Anywhere Augmentation, Höllerer said. Augmented reality is stifled by limitations in software and hardware, he explained. Cellphones require superb battery life, computational power, cameras and tracking sensors. For software, augmented reality requires a much more sophisticated artificial intelligence and 3-D modeling applications. And above all, this technology must become affordable to consumers. The best possible technology that is available today would nearly cost $100,000 for a solid augmented-reality device, Höllerer said.

Given the cost of creating decent augmented-reality technology, early attempts have focused on two areas. One, augmented reality for your computer is prominently appearing in attention-grabbing, big-budget advertisements. And a few consumer applications of the technology are just beginning to surface in smartphones.


A recent example of augmented reality appeared in the marketing campaign for the sci-fi blockbuster District 9. On the movie’s official website was a “training simulator” game, which asked computer users to print a postcard containing the District 9 logo and hold it in front of a webcam. The postcard contains a marker; when the game detects that marker in the webcam video, it overlays a 3-D hologram of a District 9 character on the computer screen. From there, players can click buttons to fire a gun, jump up and down or throw a human against a wall in the game. (See video above.)

Mattel is using the same type of 3-D imaging augmented reality in “i-Tag” action figures for James Cameron’s new movie Avatar. The toy includes a card containing a marker, which is projected as a 3-D action figure on a computer. This way, children can battle each other’s virtual characters on a computer screen.

But augmented reality isn’t truly useful in a static desktop environment, Höllerer said, because people’s day-to-day realities involve more than sitting around all day (outside of work, at least). And that’s why smartphones, which include GPS hardware and cameras, are crucial to driving the evolution of augmented reality.

Brian Selzer, co-founder of Ogmento, a company that creates augmented reality products for games and marketing, recognizes the need for augmented reality to go mobile. He said his company is working on several projects coming in the near future to help market mainstream movies with augmented reality smartphone apps. For example, movie posters will trigger interactive experiences on an iPhone, such as a trailer or even a virtual treasure hunt to promote the film.

“The smartphone is bringing AR into the masses right now,” Selzer said. “In 2010 every blockbuster movie is going to have a mobile AR campaign tied to it.”

On the consumer end of the spectrum, developers have recently released augmented reality apps for the Google Android-powered HTC G1 handset. Layar, a company based in Amsterdam, released an augmented reality browser for Android smartphones in June. The Layar browser (video above) looks at an environment through the phone’s camera, and the app displays houses for sale, popular restaurants and shops, and tourist attractions. The software relies on downloading “layers” of data provided by developers coding for the platform. Thus, while the information appears to display in real time, it’s not truly real-time: The app can’t analyze data it hasn’t downloaded ahead of time.

“This is the first time media, internet and digital information is being combined with reality,” said Martin Lens-FitzGerald, co-founder of Layar. “You know more, you find more, or you see something you haven’t seen before. Some people are even saying that it might be even bigger than the web.”

Cellphone giant Nokia is currently testing an AR app called Point & Find, which involves pointing your camera phone at real-world objects and planting virtual information tags on them (above). Users of the app can view each other’s tags on the phone screen, essentially crowdsourcing an augmented reality.

“This year we’re feeling a real urgency to work on augmented reality because the hardware is finally catching up to our needs,” said Rebecca Allen, director of Nokia’s research center in Hollywood.

Georgia Tech is also busy tinkering with augmented reality. The video demo above demonstrates an augmented-reality zombie shooter called ARhrrrr. The smartphone in use is a prototype containing an Nvidia Tegra, a powerful chip specializing in high-end graphics for mobile devices. How do you play? Point the phone camera at a map containing markers, and a 3D hologram of a town overrun by zombies appears on the phone’s screen. Using the phone, you can shoot the zombies from the perspective of a helicopter pilot. And you can even place (real) Skittles on the physical map and shoot them to set off (virtual) bombs.

As for the iPhone, officially there are no augmented reality apps in the App Store yet — because Apple doesn’t provide an open API to access live video from the phone’s camera. This barrier prompted augmented reality enthusiasts and professionals to write an Open Letter to Apple pleading for access to this API to make augmented reality apps possible in the App Store.

Brad Foxhoven, Selzer’s partner at Ogmento, said Apple has told him the next version of the iPhone OS (3.1) “would make [AR developers] happy,” implying the live-video API will become open, and AR apps will become available very soon.

Meanwhile, some augmented reality developers have already hacked away at the iPhone’s software development kit to code proof-of-concept augmented reality apps. The video above demonstrates an app called Twittaround, an augmented reality Twitter viewer on the iPhone. The app shows live tweets of mobile Twitter users around your location.

“We’re doing as much as we can with the current technology,” Selzer said regarding the overall augmented-reality developer community. “This industry is just getting started, and as processing speeds speed up, and as more creative individuals get involved, our belief is this is going to become a platform that becomes massively adopted and immersed in the next few years.”

See Also:

• At the Dawn of the Augmented Reality Industry
• Augmented Reality and atemporality
• Augmented Reality, coming soon to a government near you
• Blink-182 Rocks ‘Augmented Reality’ Show in Doritos Bag …
• African Augmented Reality
• Augmented Reality Business Cards: WoW For Suits?
• 3D Avatar in Baseball Cards is the New Bubble Gum

Photo: Layar

In its never-ending quest to sell you more things, Best Buy has added augmented reality to its Sunday ads. The printed missives can now be used, in conjunction with a webcam and a purpose-built website, to create 3D representations of the latest product being pimped. Yes, it’s probably easier to walk to a store and handle the goods in person, but that’s hardly the point of AR now, is it? We’re not sure where to rank this effort in the pantheon of quirky promotional ideas, but we’ll give credit to the big box retailer for stepping outside itself and trying something new to separate you from your hard-earned cash.

[Via Coolest Gadgets]

Filed under: Misc. Gadgets

Best Buy goes 3D, even augmented reality isn’t safe from advertising originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 06 Aug 2009 01:43:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Since barcodes are the sign of the devil (must be true, we read it on the interwebs) it’s no surprise that everyone wants to replace ’em. QR codes have been quite popular, allowing people and companies to tag their stuff with colorful decals filled with bits and bytes, and of course RFID tags are still going strong, but a team of researchers at MIT has come up with something better: Bokode. It’s effectively a tiny little retroreflective holograph that is just 3mm wide but, when a camera focused to infinity sweeps across it, the Bokodes become clear and appear much larger, captured in the video below. In this way they can contain “thousands of bits” of data and, interestingly, show positional information too, meaning the camera knows where in 3D space it is in relation to the tag. This, of course, has hundreds of potential applications ranging from grocery shopping to augmented reality, and should lead to new and exciting ways for scholars to interpret/misinterpret Revelations.

[Via BBC]

Continue reading MIT’s Bokode tech calls out zebra stripes, QR codes for battle of barcode supremacy

Filed under: Misc. Gadgets

MIT’s Bokode tech calls out zebra stripes, QR codes for battle of barcode supremacy originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 28 Jul 2009 09:24:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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