But we have been working hard to find you the best possible speakers from the augmented reality industry, so for those of you that have a ticket already, keep it safe as we have a fantastic agenda lined up for you. In fact, we have so many excellent speakers lined up for the event that the agenda is a nightmare to prepare; we could happily let each of our speakers talk for hours.  From talking to each of the presenters I’m excited, we’ll have demos never seen before and we should have our hands on some exclusive hardware, which I am told there is only two units in existence in Europe and America. I’m keeping tight lipped about that one until it’s confirmed, but I’m saving my money.

We are pleased to announce that Wikitude are the headline event sponsors. Wikitude as you know were voted the number 1 augmented reality browser by you in the Augmented Planet 2009 Readers Choice Awards. So it’s fantastic to have them at the event and taking part.

Registration opens at 6pm and the event starts at 6:30pm

The latest agenda is:

• Welcome and overview (Augmented Planet and our host Elmwood)
• Wikitude World Browser    (Wikitude)
• Making money from AR    - Myles Peyton (Total Immersion)
• Latest demos  - James Alliban
• Transparencies,  A multi-sensory mixed reality art installation  – Shira Gutgold
• Real-life case study – Stephane Cheikh (SITA Lab)
• Real-life case study – Richard (Yuza mobile)
• Viz*It (Visualize it) Bring museums to life – Dick Davies (Ambient Performance)
• The Yell AR mobile browser – Mark Parsonage (Yell Group)
• Real-life case study – Jonathan Chippindale (Holition)

Due to popular demand we have opened up some additional tickets, the event is going to be very busy with over 150 attendees so if you are unable to make it, if you could cancel your ticket that would be great.

Headline Sponsor

Related posts:

1. Register Now For Augmented Planet London
2. Augmented Planet London – Agenda Update
3. Augmented Reality Events – April – June (Updated)

There are several great augmented reality focused events taking place over the next few months. In the US we have are2010 (Augmented Reality Event), which is focused on Business, Technology and Production.

Held in June 2-3 in Santa Clara, are2010 looks like a fantastic event. I’ll be speaking at the event on the Mobile AR market landscape and have the honour of speaking alongside Robert Rice (Neogence) and Christina Perey (Perey Research and Consulting). Set over 2 days, the agenda looks fantastic with talks on developing games, business opportunities, hardware talks, + so much more. I practically insist you stop reading this blog and book your place now by visiting augmentedrealityevent.com.

In Berlin on the 23rd April is the first European AR Business conference, the largest European augmented reality event focused on the commercial aspects of AR. Put together by Dan from AugmentedCitizen.org, this promises to be another excellent event for anyone looking to find out more. Speakers include David Caabeiro (Sequence Point Software), Chetan Damani (acrossair), Eric Gehl (Total Immersion) + many more.

You can book your place by visiting www.arbcon.eu

Taking place at the San Francisco Airport Marriott on the 21st April,  Augmented Reality Conference is an event focused on the commercial aspects of augmented reality. Lots of good speakers including Total Immersion, Yelp, Zugara, Ogmento and great content. For more info visit  america.arconf.com

At Augmented Planet, despite being asked to run a one day event here in the UK we have not been that brave but we are running our second evening event on the 12th May in London.  Speakers include Total Immersion, James Alliban, Yell, + many more.  Tickets are free and limited, last look we had less than 50 left. You can book your space at augmentedplanet.eventbright.com

All 3 of these events are excellent place for you to see the latest developments with augmented reality, find out how you make money, see fantastic demos and meet people in the industry. There are also plenty of opportunity to get involved with sponsorship or exhibiting. If you are interested let me know and I will point you at the right people.

Related posts:

1. ARE2010 Event Agenda
2. Augmented Planet London Sponsored by Wikitude
3. Augmented Planet Event Wrap Up

After the success of last years Augmented Planet Event in London we’re back for more live demos and the latest innovation from the world of augmented reality.

Join us on the 12th May from 6pm – 10pm in London Soho for a night of demos from:

• Total Immersion
• Yell
• Yuzamobile
• James Alliban
• + many more

You should book your free place now if:

• You’re interested in augmented reality
• You want to see cool augmented reality demos
• Want to hear from the industry experts
• You’re interested in how to make money from augmented reality
• Want to network with people in the industry

Space is limited to 150 people

Speaking slots are disappearing fast, if you have an augmented reality application and you want to take part in our 5 minute spotlight live demo fest, then send an email now to info @ augmentedplanet.com

If it’s augmented reality, it’s in Augmented Planet.

Related posts:

1. Augmented Planet London Sponsored by Wikitude
2. Augmented Planet London – Agenda Update
3. Augmented Planet – Augmented Reality Event

The event takes place on the 2nd and 3rd of June and will be held in Santa Clara (California), the tracks list look impressive and will appeal to you whether you are in, Business, Production or Development so it should be well worth the travel even if you are the wrong side of the Atlantic.

There is still the opportunity to speak at the event if you have a good solution or an interesting talk. The call for papers will close soon so if you are interested in speaking at one of the largest conferences dedicated to augmented reality then you should submit your paper now: augmentedrealityevent.com/schedule

Follow the event on twitter: twitter.com/arealityevent

We’ll cover the event in more detail as the agenda takes shape, but in the mean time get in and register to book you place now.

augmentedrealityevent.com

Related posts:

1. ARE2010 Event Agenda
2. Augmented Planet – Augmented Reality Event
3. Win Tickets to ARE2010

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)

www.youtube.com/watch?v=tb0pMeg1UN0

Related posts:

1. Augmented Planet – Augmented Reality Event
2. Augmented Planet Event Wrap Up
3. Augmented Planet London Sponsored by Wikitude

Thanks of course to Nitin Samani, John Wyer for helping out and of course our guest speakers Myles Peyton, James Alliban and Chris O’Shea. You’ll never know the stress me and Nitin went through until John turned up with his laptop.

If you didn’t manage to write down all the demos that I showed this is the list with links to a YouTube demo.

Hyperlinking demos
RedLaser (barcode scanner)
Bableshot (language translator)
SnapTell (product recognition)
CubeCheater (solve the Rubix Cube)
GetFugal (logo recognition)

Marker demos (links to try the demos)
Lost Valentinos (the band demo)
Twitter business cards
GE SmartGrid

Mobile demos
Layar
Wikitude
Junaio

Markerless demos
I couldn’t install the codex for this one, but this is the mobile face recognition demo I was planning on showing.
TAT
Links to speakers websites
James Alliban
Myles Peyton
Chris O’Shea

Both Nitin and John where taking photos, once they send them over I’ll put them in to Flickr and send out the link.

Next up for me, I am attending the Vodafone AppStar event tomorrow. If you are a developer and building Widgets then they have a few places left at this free event.  You can find out more and register here appstaruk.eventbrite.com.

Related posts:

1. Augmented Planet London – Agenda Update
2. Augmented Planet London Sponsored by Wikitude
3. Register Now For Augmented Planet London

The applications history lies in a product from Metaio called iLiving. The idea is you have a space you want to fill with furniture, you take a picture of the space and then select from a list of stock items like tables, chairs, plants etc and place them in the photo to see how they would look. Junaio takes that concept a lot further, now you can take picture of anywhere, chose from an exhaustive list of animated 3D images to add to your photo and share your creations.

To create your scene just snap the background and then add and position the 3D characters you want to include, you’re not limited to just images as you can also link a twitter account and see the latest twitter message displayed in real-time.  Once you have created your master piece you can publish it to Facebook, save it as a photo or publish it to Junaio.

Publishing to Junaio is where you’ll have the most fun. Posting your master piece and then swapping to ‘Live’ turns on the augmented reality browser functionality and shows you what other users have published in the same area so you’ll be able to compare creations. I’m sure over the next few weeks we are going to be seeing a fair number of dinosaurs around Big Ben or flying over London.

It’s good to see something different to the usual local search browsers and Junaio is certainly different bring in a real fun viral element, it’s pretty addictive and you’ll soon find yourself walking around snapping away looking to create new scenes.

Here is a couple of images I took this morning.

Download Junaio here : itunes.apple.com/us/app/junaio/id337415615
Visit the website: www.junaio.com
Watch the video: www.youtube.com/user/metaioAR#p/a/u/2/2_fYcdH2nMY
Get updates on the junaio community: junaio.wordpress.com/

If you are at the Augmented Planet event tonight we’ll do a demo of Junio and test out creating a scene linked to twitter. Tickets for the event have all gone with around 100 augmented reality enthusiasts dropping by.

PS the Chumby competition is coming, I’m having email problems preventing me making the competition live but hopefully that will be sorted today.

Related posts:

1. Layar and Junaio News Catch-up
2. Augmented Reality Property Search With Junaio
3. ScavengAR and Junaio

Bit of a late blog today, it’s been a busy day. Most of it has been spent preparing slides and demos for next week. The rest of it has been spent in the garage trying to build some kind of rig that will support an iPhone and web-cam for the demos. Without it, it will be impossible to show any kind of live demo. I have had some kind of success, time will tell when the paint dries.

Cheers to Michael Krivicka for this entertaining video of everything we hope augmented reality will be. Very entertaining

www.youtube.com/watch?v=G_AzDO_uwz8

It reminds me of a pair of x-ray specs I sent away for out of a comic when I was a kid.

Don’t do it kids, they don’t work

Related posts:

1. Michael Jackson in an augmented reality blog?
2. TwittAround AR App for the iPhone 3GS
3. WorkSnug For The iPhone First Look

Augmented Planet turned 6 months old this week. Initially when I started the blog the first few days we had a readership of around 5 people. I remember the day traffic went through the roof and reached 10, I thought wow 10 readers. We have come a long way since then and are only just a tad short of 10,000 readers a month which just goes to show how much the excitement around augmented reality has grown. Speaking of growing, all the tickets for the Augmented Planet event on the 11th November (London) have almost gone. I need to speak to the venue to see if they are happy for us to have more people in the space but best register now if you are interested.

During the week I managed to get to the Symbian Exchange and Exposition event, or SEE09 as it’s now called. At the show the augmented reality browser heavy weight Layar announced that they plan to release their browser on the Symbian platform next year, March if I remember correctly.

VentureBeat have an interesting write up about Layar for Symbian which you can read here.

Layar’s van der Klein said that moving to Nokia-Symbian was one of the toughest decisions his company has yet to make. There are still questions about whether Nokia users are accessing applications to the extent they are on other smart phones. Android and the iPhone are like two full-speed trains, he said, while Symbian’s train is still stalled “in a gutter.” (source VentureBeat)

I’d say that’s a bit harsh since Symbian are not responsible for the appstores or lack thereof on Symbian OS. The OEMs and Operator need to take a slice of that blame.

Metaio are launching their new augmented reality browser for the iPhone imminently. It was due Tuesday next week but the website now says coming soon so one wonders if it’s caught in that famous iTunes publishing queue.

Random Junaio screen shots

I have to admit I’m looking forward to Junaio. I didn’t like the first Junaio video that Metaio released, it was too arty for my liking, but they have since released a real teaser video that gives us a good look at the product. I must say it looks intriguing. What’s caught my attention is the ability to put animation into the picture. Take a look at the dinosaur at the Golden Gate Bridge, it’s definitely different. It has similar features to their iLiving product currently in the iPhone store and is an augmented reality browser to boot.

The new Junaio teaser

www.youtube.com/watch?v=2_fYcdH2nMY

Finally I sent my brother-in-law who is a London Taxi driver, out on a field trip to test Wikitude and Layar around London to see what gets the best verdict from average Joe. Let’s say his results are interesting but we’ll leave that till next week when we’ll also launch the first Augmented Planet competition to win a Chumby. More on that very soon.

Win me!

Related posts:

1. Junaio Hits The iPhone
2. Layar & Wikitude come to the iPhone
3. ScavengAR and Junaio

Yesterday I attended the augmented reality mashup event in London which was attended some of the leading companies in the augmented reality space. It was good opportunity to put faces to some of the products I have been blogging about for sometime.  I arrived 45 minutes late due to a mapping error beyond my control (really), when I got to the venue they told me they were full and were not accepting any more admissions, such was the interest in the event. Fortunately (and I mean fortunately because I had the journey from hell) they found a few empty seats for the few of us that were waiting downstairs.
 
When I found my seat they were in full flow doing AR demos. Some of the demos I remember were Jan Schlink from Metaio, Myles Peyton from Total Immersion,Charles Cadbury from WhiteApp, Richard Leyland, WorkSnug, Ravi Leyland from Acrossair and Mark Stimpfig from ConnectEd. There were a few others but I missed them due to my lateness. The demos had an open mic feel where the speaker got just a few minutes to talk about their solution but not give a sales pitch. The star of the show was Myles from Total Immersion who showed a demo relating to the James Cameron Avatar movie and how they are bring toys to live. When you see how polished Total Immersion’s products are you know they are a company that has been doing this for a long time and they just get the whole augmented reality thing.

Total Immersion Avatar Toys (not the demo from the event)

www.youtube.com/watch?v=XMAaOxjTKMI

WorkSnug
 

www.youtube.com/watch?v=0z_Q3yl4NjM

White label this augmented reality application

The topic of VCs investing in augmented reality came up, GeoVation are investing should you have the next big idea and be looking for funding.
 
After the demos the event format switched to a panel session, I found the panel session a little hard to keep up with as the diversity of the panel members was too vast and covered wildly different areas. While it was interesting to hear the various points of view it was a bit like having a panel on the motor industry made up with members from F1, Ford, Big Joe’s Garage Repair, BMW, QuickFit, and the manager from the local Wild Bean Cafe. All of them will have valid points on motoring and how it affects their business but too many different views to keep up with.  From the panel members augmented reality meant different things, audio, multimedia, advertising so opinions where wide. It would have been better to focus on a smaller topic, eg the future of augmented reality browsers applications rather than the global AR space as a whole as my thoughts turned to beer at that point.
 
All in all it was a good event and thanks to the Mashup guys for arranging the event. I really enjoyed the networking over a few beers after and catching up with people. What was really interesting was the people that I met with and how they were looking to apply augmented reality. Everyone one from architects with ideas on recreating parts of London from the late 1800s (that would be a cool festival), people from the military looking to see how AR can be used in combat situations, cable companies looking to see how augmented reality can help engineers find cables under the streets, and everyone in between. Real people with real solutions, you can’t beat networking.
 
If you didn’t manage to make the event, or if you still want more augmented reality then don’t forget on the 11th November we have a free augmented reality event in London. You can find out more here: augmentedplanet.eventbrite.com

Related posts:

1. Total Immersions Augmented Reality on Sky News
2. Register Now For Augmented Planet London
3. Augmented Planet Event Wrap Up