The December issues of Esquire is set to include half a dozen of pages of Augmented Reality the reader can experience by holding pages of the magazine with a special marker up to their webcam. Apparently it cost 6 figures to produce, with advertisers like Lexus eating up some of the development costs.
Here’s a shot of the cover with Robert Downey Jr. and the b/w marker that triggers the AR of him in 3D. I guess they decided to go the marker route to avoid people having to install a plug-in to launch the experience, which is what we did for our GE + Popular Science AR cover back in July.
Cool banner idea by Crispin for Burger King. It’s an Augmented Reality video banner that uses a $1 bill as the trigger for an animation promoting Burger King’s 1$ menu. To trigger the animation, the user simply holds up a 1$ bill to their webcam instead of printing out a marker/code.
The idea works because its to promote it’s 1$ menu, and because everyone has a dollar bill, it’s likely they’ll be able to try it out. I like the functionality of flipping the dollar over to see the available items on the 1$ menu. Try it out here.
It utilizes Augmented Reality (although this time there’s no need to print out a marker) along with the same proprietary Motion Capture technology you saw in our last prototype, the “Webcam Social Shopper”, to show how the technologies can be utilized within the casual gaming space to create entirely unique and immersive webcam based flash games.
The game we’ve created to showcase the coupling of these technologies is called “Cannonballz”. By using motion capture, we are able to allow anyone with a webcam to physically engage with the game’s environment. In short, they get to “appear” in the gameplay. In this case, they are dodging cannonballs while trying desperately to save their friends (which are imported via a Facebook Connect integration) and accumulate points. Once their game is over, people can quickly and easily share their scores and the game by easily uploading it to their Facebook stream (once again, this integration is made easy thanks to Facebook Connect).
The SCR Mug Shooter uses your webcam and facial recognition software to take morphed photos of your face, then puts them in a queue to display on people’s Mug Shooter screensavers around the world.
The execution is not awesome — if you use it you’ll notice a lot of lagging and bugginess — but it’s a neat idea all the same.
Following on from the genius of Kutiman’s Thru-Yu and the lovely inbflat – here’s another quirky collaborative music project done by a bunch of people getting creative with webcams and some clever editing.
enjoy…
This music video was shot for Sour’s ‘Hibi no Neiro’ (Tone of everyday) from their first mini album ‘Water Flavor EP’. The cast were selected from the actual Sour fan base, from many countries around the world. Each person and scene was filmed purely via webcam.
Directors: Masashi Kawamura + Hal Kirkland + Magico Nakamura + Masayoshi Nakamura
The webcam Social Shopper by Zugara. Coupling the functionality of both Augmented Reality and Motion Capture. Use your webcam to try on clothes before you buy!
Zagura like to think of it as “Augmented Reality meets Utility”. This app allows you to seemingly hold articles of clothing up in front of yourself to see “how they look”. And the Motion Capture allows the app to track your movements so you can interact with the site (e.g. cycle through a product’s various colors/styles or take a picture of yourself so you can get immediate feedback from friends on Facebook) while standing several feet away from your computer’s controls. No extra downloads, no new plug-in, no consumer headache.
Just another example, similar to AKQA’s Priority Mail of a new wave of functional practical applications using AR.
