Say Hello To Google's Project Tango! Augmented Reality On The Go

General interest in augmented reality seems to be going through a reinvigorated phase, and It's exciting to say the least. Google's 'Tango' initiative is an experiment in space, depth and motion, and it seems like the company is intending to crowd source the research and see what people come up with. Crowdsourcing has become a very common trend in various industries, including Valve handing out Steamboxes to developers just recently, DARPA outsourcing vehicle design to concept artists and many other initiatives. The end goal of Tango will probably end up as some sort of mobile wearable interface (A guess), which would be a step beyond what the Oculus Rift could do for gaming.

Project Tango is an exploration into giving mobile devices a human-scale understanding of space and motion. What if you never found yourself lost in a new building again? What if directions to a new location didn't stop at the street address? Imagine playing hide-and-seek in your house with your favorite game character. Imagine competing against a friend for control over physical space with your own miniature army.

Social Media

Social Network is a slick look into the world of one very social media happy individual taking full advantage of the power of various networks to increase his e-popularity. Presenting the power of social media in a visual style reminiscent of augmented reality, I wouldn't be surprised if this is how we'll be engaging each other in the future, through a popularity filter of Facebook friends, Tumblr and Twitter followers. Created by Beomseok Yang and a group of students at Dankook University.

1 Up Fever - Bitcoin Collecting As A Game

I can definitely see this concept taking off in our future sometime soon, it's only going to be a matter of 'who.' This faux documentary follows the interesting concept of a city of people in the full throes of addiction to a truly fun looking game called 1 Up Fever, in which protagonists hunt Super Mario Bros. style coin around the city with a minimal Bitcoin value attached. It's a truly interesting concept, as the collective processing power of all these phones could be used to mine coins for a larger entity while the user acts like a worker, akin to Amazon's 'Mechanical Turk' crowdsourcing initiative for getting their tedious work done for pennies up to dollars a task.

In the Berlin city everyone is going crazy for a viral new app. Anyone with a smartphone can play a sort of Super Mario Bros arcade game in Augmented Reality. In the game a coin corresponds to 0.01 Bitcoins. Citizens’ habits are tainted by the game. Coins are hidden all over the city, you can spot them just scanning around with your device, not always they are easy to grab. People started to leave their jobs in order to collect Coins in the streets. 

All over the city people are jumping and running around with their smartphones, trying to grab as many virtual coins as they can… The shooting itself is been a game in the game: all the interviewees were asked to imagine the city as the app release happened for real and to answer thereby, sometimes they were even asked to play with it. Part of the work was dedicated to the Bitcoinkiez, a small Berlin district where local owners started to sell their products in Bitcoins through the Bitcoin Wallet App, which would be the 'real'  app to whom the Super Mario app is corresponding.

The First Google Glass Short Film

Interesting timing. On the same day that the Apple unveiled the next generation of their product, Google dropped this video of a film captured using the companies newest augmented reality eyewear product, known as Google Eye and Project Glass. The glasses supposedly weigh less than a pair of sunglasses, and are integrated with memory, a processor, a camera, speaker, microphone, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi antennas, an accelerometer, gyroscope, compass and battery to boot.

I can't help but be excited by the possibilities of this product, especially due to the fact that it falls into an all new mass market tech product category and the quality looks amazing (If it's not mocked up). And with a launch date of 2014, they should definitely have some time to streamline and improve the design of the glasses. I'll definitely be getting one of these day one, I've been stuck on augmented reality ever since discovering Ghost In The Shell.

Hatsune Miku - Virtual Girlfriend

Well thank you Japan. Using a mixture of a hacked Kinect implemented into a special pair of glasses, this fine fellow finally achieved his dream of interacting with Hatsune Miku in real life. I'm not a fan of the vocaloid star as much, but the tech being shown off here is pretty damn cool, especially for the fact that it was cobbled together. As much as I thought that this video was innocent though, this guy had to end it with poking his virtual girlfriend in the boobs, much to her disgust. Some things never change.