Bionic Eye - An Augmented Reality iPhone App

Bionic Eye is a new iPhone 3GS application to visualize Points of Interest (POI) located in your nearby environment in the US, thanks to a unique Augmented Reality functionality using the iPhone camera. It is similar to the Layar Mobile Augmented Reality Browser which have been released for Android phones earlier.



Bionic Eye's POI databases include restaurants, WiFi hotspots, subway stations (New York Subway, Washington Metro, Chicago L Rapid Transit), etc. Over 100.000 POI are already included in this application.

Augmented Reality Games on Phones

Augmented Reality is going to be coming to your Android phone or iPhone 3GS very shortly. All it takes is a decent processor, a camera, a compass and a GPS. These features enable fun games and useful geo-oriented applications.

The Augmented Environments Lab at Georgia Tech investigating the design and implementation of augmented- and mixed-reality experiences. Their new AR game is called ARhrrrr.



ARhrrrr is an augmented reality shooter for mobile camera-phones. The phone provides a window into a 3D town overrun with zombies. Point the camera at our special game map to mix virtual and real world content. Civilians are trapped in the town, and must escape before the zombies eat them! From your vantage point in a helicopter overhead, you must shoot the zombies to clear the path for the civilians to get out. You can also use Skittles as tangible inputs to the game, placing one on the board and shooting it to trigger an explosion.

This fast-action first-person augmented reality, where the camera controls and movement that would typically require a mouse and keyboard are handled directly by simply moving the device. Advanced tracking technology allows the player to quickly zoom in and out and view the world at steep angles, making this a highly interactive and engaging game.

ARhrrr! was designed for the Nvidia Tegra but similar games and applications will become widely available for the iPhone 3GS and Android phones soon. The virtual world and real world are merging into the Metaverse.

HOME Movie Views Tops 1M on YouTube

HOME - the Film by Yann Arthus-Bertrand has been released on June 5th 2009 World Environment Day. For the first time ever, a film has been released on the same day in over 50 countries and on every format: movie theaters, TV, DVD and Internet.

The full Project HOME movie is available on YouTube in HD (1280×720 mp4 @ 2000 kbit/s) for free. It has reached one million views in 9 days. The network traffic to deliver the full 93 minutes of HOME HD is in the magnitude of a petabyte!

The plan was to show HOME Project on YouTube until 14th June but the date has been apparently extended. The download counter is close to 1.2 millions and counting. Thank you Yann Arthus-Bertrand, PPR and YouTube!

HOME on the iPhone

It is now possible to find out the latest news on the planet, calculate your carbon footprint or watch Yann Arthus-Bertrand’s film thanks on the iPhone thanks to a free application available on the Apple Store website.

Siri Virtual Personal Assistant iPhone App

Siri is a Virtual Personal Assistant - a new way to interact with the Internet on your mobile phone. Like a real assistant, Siri helps you get things done. You interact with Siri by just saying, in your own words, what you want to do. You can ask Siri to find a romantic place for dinner, and get reservations for Saturday night. You can discover things to do over the weekend, get tickets to the movies, or call a cab when you’re out on the town. You don't have to search through a bunch of web pages, following links and hunting down facts. Siri does all the work giving you the information you need at your fingertips.

Years in the making, Siri is born out of SRI's CALO Project, the largest Artificial Intelligence project in U.S. history. (CALO stands for Cognitive Assistant that Learns and Organizes). Made possible by a $150 million DARPA investment, the CALO Project included 25 research organizations and institutions and spanned 5 years. Siri is bringing the benefits of this technology to the public, in the first mainstream consumer application of a virtual personal assistant.

Virtual Personal Assistants (VPAs) represent the next generation interaction paradigm for the Internet. In today's paradigm, we follow links on portals, feeds, and search results. With a VPA, we interact by having a conversation. We tell the assistant what we want to do, in our own words, and it applies multiple services and information sources to help accomplish our task. If the assistant does not understand completely, it asks for clarification. If it cannot find a solution from available sources, it offers alternatives. Like a real assistant, a VPA is personal: it uses information about the individual's preferences and history of interaction to help solve their specific tasks, and it gets better with experience.

Siri will launch later this summer so you’ll be able to download the Siri iPhone app later this summer.

Further Reading

• Technology Review - Emerging Technologies 2009: Intelligent Software Assistant
• Nova Spivack - Sneak Preview of Siri – The Virtual Assistant that will Make Everyone Love the iPhone

1 Billion Downloads on the Apple App Store in Nine Months

Apple just delivered its 1 Billionth (that is 1 000 000 000) application download from the App Store, which currently features over 25,000 apps built by thousands of developers. Amazing!

Mobile Broadband is the Next Internet.


Learn more on TechCrunch.

Sparkle Brings Second Life to the iPhone and iPod Touch

Genkii has launched a new iPhone application in the App Store called Sparkle IM. It is a Second Life client that runs on the iPhone or iPod Touch that allows sending and receiving IMs directly on the mobile device.



Sparkle IM is just the first virtual world app by Genkii. It is expected that the updated full Sparkle Second Life iPhone client will support 3D presence, too. Stay tuned!

Virtual Worlds could be rendered on the server side as demonstrated earlier by Vollee and Liveplace.

2008 Year in Review

2008 was the year of social networking and mobile internet innovations.

Let's highlight the most interesting news and trends of last year.

Cloud computing hype has reached all time high:

• The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google
• Google App Engine + OpenSocial = Web 3.0?
• IT in 2018
• Wua.la Launches Online P2P Storage Cloud
• Bandwidth usage of the Amazon Cloud has surpassed all of Amazon.com’s website traffic
  

Mobile Internet and gadgets has become a platform:

• iPhone Apps Lead Mobile Internet Innovations
• iPhone Roadmap Possibilities
• Rapid Mobile Broadband Usage Growth

High-Definition Video has started to conquer the Web:

• Hybrid P2P-CDN Streaming Enables HD Video Delivery
• Video Traffic Bandwidth to Reach Exabyte by 2015
• HD Flash Video on the Web

3D and Virtual Worlds have grown:

• Sun's Open Source 3D Virtual World
• Virtual Worlds are Rendered in the Cloud

Mobile Broadband Usage Statistics by Nielsen

The mobile consumer spends $350B each year on connectivity, devices, and content.
Nielsen Mobile provides syndicated consumer research to the mobile media markets.

The latest Nielsen Mobile Insight Research Reports feature interesting topics such as

• iPhone 3G and Smartphone Statistics
• U.S. Mobile Advertising Market
• Entertainment Drives Mobile Internet Growth in BRIC Countries
• Mobile Gaming Statistics
• Increased Availability of GPS on Mobile Phones Drives Consumption of Navigation and other Location-Based Services
• Mobile Video Popularity Reaching New Heights with Triple-Digit Growth in Revenues and Subscribers
• Mobile Audio Media Study
• Critical Mass - The Worldwide State of the Mobile Web

Check out Nielsen Mobile's other Research Findings here.

FUJIFILM FinePix Real 3D Camera and Imaging System

FUJIFILM has finally announced on Photokina 2008 a radical departure from current imaging systems with the development of the Real 3D System that marks a complete break from previous attempts to introduce 3D technology to the consumer camera world.

The Real 3D System consists of

• Dual CCD 3D digital camera with ‘RP (Real Photo) Processor 3D’ chip
• 3D photo frame: 8.4-inch “FinePix Real 3D Photo Frame” with over 920,000 pixels
• High Resolution 3D printing system

One major benefit of the FinePix Real 3D Photo and Movie Camera technology is that for digital camera LCD playback, display and print, the consumer can enjoy the image just as it was originally seen with the naked eye. No need for special glasses! Check out the articles on the Real 3D System on Wired and DPReview!

Welcome to the world of 3D Imaging! The next step is to use 3D desktop, mobile devices and ultimately the 3D Internet!

When will Apple deliver the iPhone 3D with 3D Camera and 3D Display? Until then check out the wonderful animations of stereoscopic images made by Joshua Heineman of Cursive Buildings.

Wuala Launches P2P Online Storage Cloud

Wuala has launched a hybrid P2P social online file sharing service.

Wuala provides secure online storage and backup for all kinds of files (including photos and large videos). Accessible from anywhere at any time and easy sharing with friends, family, and co-workers. 1 GB is free of charge and additional capacity is available either by trading in your local storage of buying more from Wuala at a reasonable starting price of $25 for 10GB.

The Wuala client supports Windows, Mac and Linux. I look forward to downloading a client for the Apple iPhone on the iTunes App Store. Is this the way to the TeraPod?

On the technical side the Wuala has an interesting P2P architecture. Wuala is a new way of storing, sharing, and publishing files on the internet. Unlike traditional online storage systems, Wuala is decentralized and can harness idle resources of participating computers to build a large, secure, and reliable online storage.

Dominik Grolimund, the founder of the Swiss startup Caleido, discusses interesting details in this Google Tech Talk video.

Liveplace - Photo-Realistic Virtual World Rendered by OTOY Cloud

Mobile phones and devices can already access virtual worlds such as Second Life on 3G networks. Vollee delivers Second Life to more than 70 handhelds by rendering it on the server side. Their Second Life iPhone client is in beta.

LivePlace plans to take cloud rendering of 3D virtual worlds to a new level. TechCrunch has posted a very impressive video of LivePlace's City Space which is a Photo-Realistic 3D virtual world. The beautiful ray tracing is done on the server side or "in the cloud" and delivered to the clients via OTOY. OTOY is a 800k web plug-in that enables cinematic quality 3D rendering in a browser with compressed content streaming.

The City Space demo shows beautiful and highly realistic rendering of different environments. It looks and feels more real and immersive than Earthmine, Everyscape or Google Maps Street View.

The demo video shows real time rendering using an ATI RX 1900 GPU and live streaming to a Treo 700 at 240 kpbs. The final product is said to be even more impressive! The first comment on the demo: "this is the pinnacle of what has been dreamed of since computer modeling and rendering was begun."

TechCrunch has more details on OTOY and LightStage here including interesting interviews with Jules Urbach, the founder and CEO of OTOY.

iPhone Roadmap Possibilities Until 2012

The future Apple iPhone generations will generate huge waves of innovations. Tomi T Ahonen argues that June 2007 marks a watershed moment in time. He is certain that the mobile telecoms world will count its time in two Eras. The Era BI: time Before the iPhone, and the ERA AI: time After the iPhone.

What are the possibilities in the Era AI?

2007 iPhone

• Samsung ARM SoC 620 MHz 1176 running at 412 Mhz + PowerVR MBX 3D GPU
• Trustzone security for sandboxing
• Advanced Power management
  
• 128MB RAM
• 8 or 16GB Flash storage
• 320×480 3.5” 163 DPI display with multitouch input
• 100 Hz Accelerometers
  
• 2 Megapixel camera with Micron CMOS
  
• Quad band GSM + EDGE
• WiFi 802.11 b/g
• BlueTooth 2.0 EDR
• Web applications
  

2008 iPhone 2.0

• 3G/UMTS
• Wireless USB
  
• Open SDK
• Cocoa Touch
  
• OpenGL ES 3D graphics
• OpenAL 3D surround audio
  
• Applications like
  
• Google Earth
• Facebook
• Ebay
• Twitter
• Home automation / remote control
  
• Games like
  
• Spore
• The Sims
  
• Second Life
  

2009 iPhone and iCar

• Next generation 45 nm SoC with advanced processing and multimedia
• 512MB RAM
• 64GB flash memory
• GPS
• 5 Megapixel camera with Image Stabilizer
  
• iCar integration
  
• HDMI TV/video interface to work as a personal AppleTV or videopod
  
• Next generation LCD with embedded scanner functionality
• NFC radio interface for contactless applications like
• Access
• Payment
• Ticketing
  
• Personal 3D display as iPhone accessory
• Games
• Social, Location Based and MMORP Games
  
• Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality applications
• EveryScape

2010 3D iPhone

• HSPA 3.5G
• Autostereoscopic 3D LCD display
• High resolution stereo camera
  

2011 iPhone, iPhone Mini or iWatch

• WiMax/LTE 4G wireless networking
• Alternative iPhone Mini or iWatch form factor
• Embedded pico projector
  

2012 iWow

• Terabyte iPod or iPhone aka the teraPod
• What else do you need in an ultimate iGadget?
  

If you like this post check out this fun iPhone roadmap forcast until 2010 in The Red Ferret Journal.

Disclaimer: based on my own ideas and research - and not Apple information

Copyright Geekr 2008

iPhone 2.0 SDK Applications to Lead Mobile Internet Innovations

What it takes to have the Internet in your pockets? Apple understands the needs and delivers. The recent announcement of the iPhone Software Development Kit (SDK) and the iPhone 2.0 marks the start of the revolution of mobile computing:

"What we saw today was the spark. The explosion will continue for twenty years. We will all feel the warmth. Watch the Steve Jobs video from today and you will understand how Apple will dominate the smartphone market for the next 25 years. Wow. What Microsoft and Windows was to the desktop, Apple and Touch will be to mobile. "

Until now the internet experience required a PC or a Mac with a browser, e-mail client and several other applications or clients like Google Earth or Second Life. To deliver this multimedia experience it takes a powerful device and a full featured operating systems like Mac OS X. The Apple iPhone is a unique device that makes true mobile internet experience a reality for the first time.


What makes the Apple iPhone uniquely powerful? Kontra has found 10 reasons in his blog post on Who can beat iPhone 2.0?

1. Design - Apple’s industrial design and highly polished multi-touch interface have no peers
2. Stores - The promise of the iTunes Store-like App Store is genuinely outstanding
3. Pricing - Apple can now leverage its high-volume iPod/Mac businesses to get favorable component prices
4. Games - high-resolution 3.5" screen, Core Animation, H.264 video, SQLite, OpenGL ES, 3-D OpenAL sound, accelerometer and multi-touch makes the iPhone 2.0 the most capable mobile game platform. Have you seen Spore on iPhone?
   
5. WebKit - the Web shines on the iPhone with its multi-touch gestures and big screen
6. Depth - multi-touch patent portfolio and gesture library bridges PCs and mobile devices. Economies of scale, core design competencies and cross-device integration opportunities will give Apple an huge advantage in product design in the post-PC era
7. SDK - Cocoa Touch, the marriage of OS X and multi-touch UI, gives developers access to the hardware, multi-touch controls and events, accelerometer, camera, etc., in the top of the line XCode IDE with built in emulator
8. Enterprise - The mobile space enables Apple to openly court businesses large and small. The enterprise world is a new and significant market for the company.
9. Ecosystem - Apple has already created the biggest-ever ecosystem around a consumer electronics product line with the iPod. No other player has comparable experience in growing a billion dollar plus ecosystem
10. Curatorship - Apple has proven with Mac OS X and the iPod that it can anticipate user needs, trade features for enhanced user experience and carefully distill choices to create coherent and desirable products.

User satisfaction surveys consistently prove actual users love their iPhones at rates far above rival devices. Safari on the iPhone has already captured 71% of the mobile browser market in less than a year.

The new iPhone SDK will start a new wave of innovations in mobile computing with applications such as:

• Reality Tagging
• People Tagging
• Reality Recognition
• Physical Social Networks
• Personalized Travel Guides
• Digital and Physical Treasure Hunt
• Distributed Mobile Games
• Credit Card and Biometrics as Software
• Paperless Receipts & Digital Business Cards
• Medical records as Software
• Physical Browsing & Digital Shopping
• Location/time-based deals

Will Apple Dominate Next Gen Computing? It is hard to tell. But the iPhone value proposition looks great for developers and users alike. A revolutionary new platform is a rare and prized opportunity for entrepreneurs as well. So much so that Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers has created a $100 million fund to fuel this innovation. KPCB’s iFund™ is a $100M investment initiative that will fund market-changing ideas and products that extend the revolutionary new iPhone and iPod touch platform.

Developers are indeed interested. Apple has announced more than 100,000 SDK downloads in just the first 4 days.

It is certainly a challenge for Google Android, Microsoft and Nokia/Symbian (to catch up?). What do you think?