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)

Some of the audience members were in favour of building plug-ins and I can see the attraction. Products like Layar and Wikitude provide you with the application leaving you only to worry about your POIs. If you are not a marketing expert then you also have the opportunity to take advantage of their vast number of users with out doing a thing.

With all these benefits there must be some drawbacks? Yes there are:

• Complexity: if you are looking for a solution that goes beyond clicking on a POI and displaying data then building a plug-in is not for you. For the time being at least forget an augmented reality version of Pac Man.

• Discoverability: Layar have 10 pages of layars in their UI, if you build a plug-in where will yours be? If you are listed on page 10 will you really get that exposure to the entire user base?

• Money: until recently building a plug-in meant it was free but Layar announced at MWC that from later this month developers will have the opportunity to create paid for layers. Great news for developers, I’m not sure what the revenue model is for this yet as I can’t find any info, but one would assume that Apple will take 30% of the in app purchase and Layar will take percentage as well. So what will developers be left with?

• Prestige: this very much depends on how you want your application to be found. If you are happy with a user clicking on another application before they launch yours then plug-ins are perfect. However if you want a user to click your Icon on the device then plug-ins are not for you

The other option is building an application yourself; the obvious benefits are you control everything and if your application is chargeable you keep a lions share of the money, but it’s not without its draw backs either:

• Bug fixes: You are responsible for fixing those and getting your app though the appstore process

• Marketing: If being on page 10 of an applications plug-in list is a problem, where will you be in the appstore?

But probably the hardest issue to address is how do you get started? Suddenly you need to worry about retrieving your location, which way is the user facing, and just how do I put data in to the camera view.  In my talk I was largely on the create you own app side of the fence. Building plug-ins is fine if your data is simple and doesn’t warrent being it’s own application, or you don’t have the skills, or dare I say if you don’t care about it enough to want to market it as yours.

In the real world the problem is often how do I extend my existing geo aware application to include augmented reality, and perhaps more importantly, how do I add the functionality quickly and easily without a major rewrite. Neither of the two solutions above deals with that problem but fortunately there is now a 3rd option that does.

Wikitude have release  an api to enable iPhone developers to easily extend or build new standalone applications and include augmented reality functionality. It’s the best of both worlds because the application is yours, users will launch the application using your icon, you take responsibility for the marketing, you control the price etc, and because you are using the tried and tested Wikitude framework it makes develpment a snap.

The framework which is also available for the Android takes the worry out of building applications by doing all the hard work for you, so much of the hard work that we asked the Mobilizy guys to create a new application around football and then set them the challenge of adding augmented reality to extend the application. Nicola took us up on the challenge and said that it took about 30 minutes to extend the application to include the new functionality, which you have to say is pretty impressive.

To demonstrate how easy it really is take a look at the video below:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=XAqOQvmpZHQ

To begin building your own augmented reality applications for mobile, visit  wikitude.org/developers where you can get the API and the sample FIFA project, then follow the 4 simple steps:

• Add the WikitudeAPI-Folder containing the Static Library, Public Headers and Resources to your iPhone-Project in Xcode.

• Add additional frameworks to your project and make changes to the linker flags (details are found in the API documentation)

• Within your custom application, create a new WikitudeARViewController with your registration data – this ViewController returns the camera view.

• Add your data as POI array and start the view

The final step is to tell us at Augmented Planet what you build and your experience with the API.
So, while the debate over create a plug-in or write your own will continue, it has become a lot easier to go down the build your own route. Thanks to the Wikitude API you can have your own icon and eat it too.

Related posts:

1. Augmented Reality In One Hour
2. Layar The First Augmented Reality AppStore
3. Wikitude 4 For The Android With Video

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

Since then I have done several head to head challenges taking both Wikitude and Layar for test drives in London to find either restaurants or famous landmarks and Wikitude always comes out on or around the top. Indeed in the recent Augmented Planet Readers Choice Awards Wikitude was voted browser of the year by you guys so they have been doing something right.

While I have a soft spot for Wikitude, one of its weakness was the fact that you could only search on Wikipedia, Qype or their Wikitude.me service. Wikitude.me is a service where you can add your own points of interest via the website and have your content appear in the camera view for all users. Layar on the other hand have an open API where developers can build their own POIs and as such have over 300 layers available making it much richer. For example you can use Layar to search for nearby twitter users.

Wikitude 4 has hit the Android and has numerous improvements. Firstly Wikitude 4 supports miles as well as kilometers so no more wondering if 7.5km is to far to walk. I’m really happy about this change and I’m glad my nagging has paid off. Wikitude 4 also boasts many new features and a UI refresh which looks really cool, they have obviously put a lot of effort into the update and it shows. Version 4 supports ‘overlays’ which are POIs either produced by Mobilizy themselves or by 3rd party’s (think Layers if you’re a Layar user). Yes developers and content providers are now able to create content to be included which is no doubt going to see an explosion of the number of search categories available in the future. Everything from the nearest cinema, and what’s showing to the location of where to buy the latest gadgets.

The current list of ‘overlays’ include: Youtube, Google Local Search, Twitter, Booking.com or Panoramio

Unlike Layar (the current version at least) which allows you to search only on one layer at a time, the Wikitude developers have kept with the approach of allowing users to search over multiple sources. In previous head to heads challenges I have run you will have seen that just because a famous POI shows up in one datasource there is no guarantee that it will show up in another. With Layar it’s a constant juggle between the various layers to ensure that you capture everything. Wikitude still allows you to search across all relevant sources so there is less chance of you missing a result. This leads on to another nice improvement over the previous version. In version 3 all your search results had the same icon in the camera view so you couldn’t tell whether that result was from Wikipedia, Qype or wherever. Version 4 address this by giving each overlay its own icon so you’ll know exactly which datasource has found the result. Potentially this could be a problem with having too many search results shown in the camera view making it impossible to read, but the Wikitude developers are ahead of the game and have included an option to limit the number of results which will help reduce the clutter.

As I said at the start, I opted to buy an iPhone and version 4 of Wikitude is currently only available for the Android so I’ll have to wait until version 4 hits the AppStore, but if it looks anything like the Android version I’m sure it will be a huge success. In the meantime take a look at the video below that has more details on some of the new Wikitude 4 augmented reality browser features.

Wikitude 4 first look

www.youtube.com/watch?v=xxly9PUCSvA

Related posts:

1. Wikitude For The iPhone – First Look
2. AR Browsers Head To Head – Test 2
3. Augmented Reality On Symbian – Wikitude Arrives

Augmented Reality Markup Language (ARML)

www.youtube.com/watch?v=qvfEORp-fhU

The full press release can be found at: http://www.mobilizy.com/enpress-release-mobilizy-proposes-arml
 
Mobilizy will be at the Over The Air Event event this Friday (25th Sept) held at Imperial College in London, so it will be an excellent chance to meet up with them and ask them questions.
 
An introduction to the ARML specification is available here: http://www.openarml.org,, but if your keen to get involved they are offering limited access to the preview version their upcoming ARML browser. If you want early access or have additional questions about ARML you can contact them directly at: arml@mobilizy.com
 

Related posts:

1. Create your own World in the Wikitude World Competition
2. Build Mobile Augmented Reality Applications In 1 Hour
3. Coming soon to an iPhone near you