Piping Hot Augmented Reality
All the faithful readers of this blog (all 3 of you) more than likely know how much I dig augmented reality. Well, check out some new cool uses for it. The image to the left comes from a new AugReality idea from Topps. These new baseball cards, mixed with the Topps application, let you see 3d representations of the players on the cards, and then let you use them to play a small mini-game. Pretty neat idea that I think could If there’s a negative about this new direction, it definitely has to be the incredible simplicity of the games you’re able to play. Such cool new technology and the best Topps can muster is Game and Watch 2.0? Hit the jump for another awesome AugReality app.
The other exciting new application that popped is Experience the Enterprise, a promo site for the new Star Trek movie. Like the Topps site, the Enterprise app uses a full color image, showing that augmented reality has apparently outgrown the cryptic black and white glyphs as of late. The second neat innovation that the Enterprise site shows is the ability to load the image into your iPhone instead of printing it out. I only toyed around with the Enterprise app for a little while, but it only really seemed to be a viewable model of said star-ship. While these are neat, and allow for the new level of interactivity that we’ve never seen before, I wonder how long it will be before the novelty wears off and people are going to have to get more creative with what these presentations actually “do.” I think we see some neat hints of this with the Topps program (games) but also with presentations like GE’s Smart Grid (blowing into the computer microphone to create ‘wind’).
