Greetings from Barcelona, the last few days have been Mobile World Congress.  I was running an augmented reality discussion group on Thursday for the Wireless Industry Partnership at the MWC Mobile Jam. Along with my panel of experts, David Caabeiro (Sequence Point Software), Dan Romescu (Augmented Citizen) and Cristina Puig (Visual Century who I will talk about in a later post) we met some really interesting people and had some fantastic discussions. Everything from UI design, should developers build plug-ins for other mobile augmented reality products (eg Layar/Wikitude) or should they create their own. One app verses many apps was a consistent theme along with how do developers make money from augmented reality when so many applications are free. Lots of blogging ammo for another day. 

Incidentally, David Caabeiro has open sourced the ARound project, so if you are a Symbian developer and are looking to build an augmented reality browser you can get the source code from here.

In Rouli’s (ARTimes) predictions for 2010 I predicted that by the end of the year we’ll have face recognition on mobile devices. You may recall the excellent TAT concept video showing the future of mobile face recognition (below),  I am happy to report that TAT have a working prototype which I manged to catch a demo of at the show. It’s still in the concept stage so not as robust as the video but I can confirm that mobile face recognition is here. Pretty amazing stuff.

I also predicted that augmented reality mapping/navigation would arrive, Mobilizy were the worthy winner of the NAVTEQ challengeat MWC for their Wikitude Drive product. The NAVTEQ challenge is an annual competition designed to recognise the best innovation on their mapping platform. They give away a ton of prizes so well worth keeping an eye on their developer program for future events.

Prediction wise I am doing pretty well and it’s only February.

Planning for Augmented Planet 2010 is well underway, we have located a venue in London Soho and are figuring out what the agenda will be. We’ll shortly be sending out a survey to see if you want a full day or an evening event and to help us focus on the right content. We are also thinking about visiting a few cities so if you are not in London (we have lots of Canadian, US, and Far Eastern readers) then be sure to complete or survey and if we get enough interest we may pay your city a visit.

That’s it from me in Barcelona, time for lunch and then 7 hours at the airport.

TAT Augmented ID -- now a reality (almost)

Related posts you may like:

1. Augmented Planet – Augmented Reality Event
2. Augmented Planet Event Wrap Up
3. Augmented Planet London Sponsored by Wikitude
4. Augmented Planet on the BBC
5. Augmented Planet London – Agenda Update