augmentation

Today, we hear how the Del Conte's deal with their enemies, find out what kind of deposit Tong makes when he visits a bank, wonder why on earth Google ever even bought the slice of AOL it just dumped, and look forward to the Pre on Verizon--but when?

Verizon to offer Palm Pre in early 2010

Verizon changes tune on Wi-Fi

Verizon customers can sign onto Boingo

Sprint Nextel to buy Virgin Mobile USA

Texting while driving more dangerous than you think

iPhone OS 3.1 will usher in 'augmented reality' apps

Google abandons AOL investment

Google Voice pulled from iPhone

B of A to reverse policy and start closing branches--online and mobile banking the reason

Microsoft uses human computing game to tune Bing

Woman sued $50,000 for Tweet

Follow-up on Yelp lawsuits… Read more

While video recording, more storage space, faster processor speeds, and better games have been the main calling cards for the iPhone 3G S, the biggest reason to upgrade may be yet to come--and it has to do with the seemingly most innocuous feature of all, the magnetometer.

Imagine a browser in which you view the real world through a camera lens and a heads-up display picks out interest points amid the living cityscape. This type of augmented reality has been the stuff of science fiction, but the cell phone browser Layar by Dutch software developer SPRXmobile claims to make it real. See the video for yourself.

Layar takes the sort of GPS POI data in current map-based apps, like ATMs, houses for sale, or nearby hotspots, and displays them overlaid on the landscape as seen through the camera lens.

It's debuting later this month for Android phones in the Netherlands--not exactly a huge starting demographic, but if it works, this could be the start of something big.… Read more

E3's come and gone, but some oddities still linger. Shown during the Sony E3 press conference and discussed little after that, Invizimals is a curious game using the PSP's camera to create augmented reality "animal ghosts" that appear in real-life settings. Coded capture cards seem to attract the beasts, after which they do battle to each other. Nintendo DS-like blow-and-shake controls add extra input to the critter-fighting.

Confused? Check out the trailer. Would augmented reality gaming be something you'd like to see more of? Would it be something you'd trust the children with? And, … Read more

For decades, slightly cheesy sleight-of-hand artists around the world have promised that "you won't believe your eyes!" before demonstrating ageless moves handed down from generation to generation.

Now that an ever-accelerating cascade of eye-popping visual technology such as augmented reality has threatened to steal some of the magic dust from old-fashioned magicians, along comes a pasteboard prestidigitator who folds augmented reality into his own YouTube-ready routine.

Enter Marco Tempest, a renegade cardsharp and AR artist who assembled an open-source, real-time theater of the future for your entertainment, called Augmented Reality Magic 1.0.

Is this, ladies and gentlemen, magic of the future?… Read more

Hewlett-Packard is giving the public a chance to try out one of the experimental technologies it's cooking up. HP Labs is expected to announce Wednesday the open beta of Mscapes, a suite of software applications that let anyone create interactive location-based games or tours.

The Mscapes online authoring wizard can be used to design digital overlays on a map using photos, videos, graphics, text, or audio. Anyone with a GPS-enabled mobile device running Windows Mobile can use the Mscapes client to play any of the created games as they move through the physical world.

For example, HP Labs partnered … Read more

Total Immersion, which wowed the Demo crowd two years ago, has technology that lets you merge computer-generated objects into live video. At Demo 07, the company showed off how a small PC with a camera could add a little dancing cartoon character to a live video of a newspaper. In other words: the newspaper was flat, but the live video of it on the PC's screen had real-time characters dancing around on it. And when the camera moved, they moved, so they almost appeared to be connected to the paper.

This technology will be great for navigation apps, and … Read more

PALO ALTO, Calif.--While it sounds like a traveling magic show, Mobile Augmented Reality is actually the future of how we'll access information on our wireless phones.

Though researchers around the world have been developing the technology for a decade, Nokia gave us a peek at its foray into the field Thursday when it opened its Nokia Research Center (NRC) in Palo Alto, Calif. And yes, it is a little bit magical.

Combining mobile cameras, GPS, orientation sensors and wireless devices, mobile augmented reality lets a device capture an image of a location, like San Francisco's Union Square, … Read more