Contrary to popular belief I’m not dead

Posted by Lester Madden under Augmented Reality, Smartphones, Software, Symbian, Travel

I left Symbian at the end of August and have had a nice relaxing September at home. I haven’t been up too much, other than catching up on a few xBox titles I missed out on.

SeeScan – Mobile AR

Posted by Lester Madden under Augmented Reality, Smartphones

Regular readers will know that augmented reality is a passion of mine. So much so that I setup another blog, AugmentedPlanet where I could blog away happily about all things AR.

However I came across a really cool mobile augmented reality demo for visually impaired people today that I thought was worth sharing. The SeeScan application from iVisit is a real-time object recognition application that enables people with a visual impairment to point their smartphone at an object and have it tell them what it is.

Augmented Reality Clothing And Face Recognition

Posted by Lester Madden under Augmented Reality, Smartphones

What do your clothes say about you? Well take a tee-shirt, twitter and create an augmented reality mashup they can apparently say quiet a lot. Imaging sitting on a train and anyone being able to see your tweets just by pointing their smartphone at you?

Augmented Reality And Smartphone Show 2009

Posted by Lester Madden under Augmented Reality, General, Smartphones, Symbian

Smartphone Show 2009 planning has started, finally. We are a little late this year what with the Symbian -> Nokia -> Symbian Foundation move, but things are starting to move. As I’m sure I said before I am responsible for the DevFest which is all things developer at the show and you probably guessed that I am keen to have an augmented reality for smartphones focus at the show this year to generate some excitement/awareness of this super cool technology.

AR: Virtual Haircut

Posted by Lester Madden under Augmented Reality

Fashion is such an obvious candidate for the augmented reality solutions we’ll use in the future.

AR, We Are Ready And Willing But Where Are You?

Posted by Lester Madden under Augmented Reality

In response to my post on Friday I had a lot of discussions with people in the office talking about the commercial usage of AR. While everyone agrees that it’s a super cool technology, the question on everyone’s lips is, if its so good why isn’t it here already?

Commercializing Augmented Reality

Posted by Lester Madden under Augmented Reality, Smartphones

After yesterdays post about how cool augmented reality is, I spent the morning and most of the afternoon doing demos to people around the office. The guys here were coming up possible uses from everything from tee-shirts to games. I see AR as a technology that is just waiting to become the next big thing, it just needs a killer app to propel it into the public eye before it becomes part of our everyday lives and something we take for granted. Normally that’s waiting for the porn or advertising industries to become adopters.

Augumented Reality Demo For Nokia Devices

Posted by Lester Madden under Augmented Reality, Smartphones, Software, Symbian

When I left school I wanted to write computer games. The problem was couldn’t draw so my skills in the computer gaming world were somewhat limited. So I ended up doing systems programming which didn’t require any game development skills, just good old ODBC to suck data out a database somewhere and display it in a form. I still shed the odd tear at what could have been but I am content with playing games and keeping up to date with future gaming technology.

The Future Is Already Here

Posted by Lester Madden under Augmented Reality, Gadgets, Smartphones, Symbian

A guy called Charles H. Duell who was the commissioner of the US patents office back in 1899 once said, “everything that can be invented has been invented”. Well he got that one wrong. Funny though, last week I was raving over Microsoft’s augmented reality project only to find that there is a game available on Symbian OS for the Nokia N95.

Augmented Reality

Posted by Lester Madden under Augmented Reality, General, Software

Imagine you are walking down the street and feeling hungry. Wouldn’t it be great if you could take out your trusty smartphone, point the camera at a restaurant and have the menu appear on your phone?