Augmented Reality

Augmented Reality Jumps the Shark

Posted by Sam Churchill on December 21st, 2009

TechCrunch reports that Yelp turned down an offer of half a billion dollars from the search giant. The speculation is that Yelp got another bid or was offered a partnership that made selling the augmented reality company less than necessary.

Augmented reality uses your cameraphone, GPS, and compass to show virtual items in the real world. Put your camera in front of a restaurant and it will show related information, such as finding nearby Twitter users.

Yelp’s augmented reality iPhone app would easily dovetail into Google’s Street View map service. It overlays Yelp information over real-time video iPhone users shoot around them, explains econsultancy.

ReadWriteWeb notes that location-based social network Brightkite announced this morning that it has added what it calls the first mobile Augmented Reality advertising for US markets. It’s added to their Layar augmented reality browser.

Layar is a browser for a wide variety of AR data layers, from real-estate listings to government data to messages posted to networks like Brightkite. It is available for Android phones and was available on the iPhone until it was withdrawn from the marketplace last week due to excessive crashes.

The Brightkite ads appear to be just for electronics retailer BestBuy so far, says ReadWrite. A small radar screen has been added, showing the location of nearby BustBuy stores. The circles join the clearly different annotations for text messages and photos posted by nearby users. The ads are relatively unobtrusive for now.

A new product, Google Goggles hopes to bring Mobile Image Recognition to the mainstream.

The concept is dead simple – a user snaps a photo of an object around them, be it a book, building, text or any other object, and the app will return search results tailored for that object.

Snap a photo of a book you’re interested in, for example, and goggles will return reviews, table of contents, links to purchase the book and anything else residing in Google’s index that might be relevant. Google says it fuzzed out the people recognition feature of the software due to “privacy concerns”.

Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt got some privacy advocates agitated this week with a naïve attitude toward privacy, notes John Dvorak. Schmidt said:

“If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place, but if you really need that kind of privacy, the reality is that search engines including Google do retain this information for some time, and it’s important, for example that we are all subject in the United States to the Patriot Act. It is possible that that information could be made available to the authorities.”

Google says it has developed a kind of quantum computer capable of identifying objects that appear in digital photos and videos. According to the company, the system outperforms the classical algorithms running across its current network of worldwide data centers.

Maybe that’s what Eric Schmidt was doing in Utah earlier this month.

Hartmut Neven, Google technical lead manager for image recognition, recently unveiled the company’s ongoing quantum computing work in a post on the company’s research blog. Google spent the past three years working in tandem with D-Wave in Vancouver, Canada, on a quantum system designed to identify images, says The Register. D-Wave develops processors that utilize a quantum algorithm by magnetically coupling superconducting loops called rf-squid flux qubits.

Next stop: Superconducting Quantum Interference Devices for your avatar.

source : dailywireless.org