Almost exactly a year ago I posted about Historypin, developed by We Are What We Do, and on June 11th it left beta with its global launch at the Museum of New York.
The latest version of Historypin includes exciting features, the most important been its release of a mobile app, that will allow anyone to create impressive augmented reality experiences. For example, you can…
Explore the Historypin map – the Historypin map has 1000s of images and stories pinned to it and the app allows you to browse this by date and location, using your location to find the nearest content, or exploring remotely.
Explore the streets – holding your phone up to the street, the app uses your camera view to display nearby images. By selecting the image, it can be overlaid onto the modern view to create an historical comparison, which you can toggle or fade between.
Read stories and recollections – all stories shared can be accessed through the app.
Capture a modern moment of history – images taken with the app are immediately pinned to the Historypin map, with any captions and stories you add. Images can also be added from your phone’s albums.
Digitise an old photo – take photos of old pictures as an easy alternative to scanning them, then add photo details and pin them directly to the Historypin map.
Of interest to librarians is the ability to create tours which can include embedded sound and video, just like this Beatlemania tour.
As I said in my original post, Historypin places a much needed emphases on the social role that technology can play, focusing on storytelling and the relationships that it can create. Historypin’s co-founder and executive Nick Stanhope sums it up nicely;
But, really, it’s not about the tech. It’s about those conversations – little ones, across families and streets, and big ones, involving millions of citizen historians. Through all of these conversations, we can create a place to explore history in amazing ways and help families and neighbourhoods come together around what we all share: history.
C3 Technologies is a Swedish company offering photo-realistic 3D city visualizations for search and navigation. The extreme detail available offers endless opportunities for the creation of augmented and/or social experiences and may soon be available on mobile devices.
A Swedish offshoot of SAAB, C3 has ultra sharp 3D maps of major cities based on de-classified government aerial photography technology. … They are actively licensing their 3D photography through an SDK such that it can be used for mobile applications on iPhone, iPad, and Android, or in your computer via a Javascript API for Safari, Chrome, Firefox, and IE. Now covering 100 cities in the US and Europe, C3’s maps are among the most detailed I’ve ever seen, and the company is expanding into interior spaces as well. You could explore an ultra-realistic 3D map of a building before you ever set foot inside it.
As Emgard explains in the … video, the applications for social mapping are clear. With a high-quality three dimensional map you can show friends exactly where you want to meet – you could tag a tree or lamp-post with no problem! I’m sure we’ll also see virtual tour apps – guides so clear that you can’t possibly get lost.
The University of Wisconsin’s Games, Learning and Society research group have released ARIS (Augmented Reality and Interactive Storytelling), a tool for making location based educational games, stories, and tours.
Features
- Use GPS location and QR Codes to link to virtual characters, items and media
- Create and Place virtual Items that can be picked up by players, exchanged, used and moved around in a persistent AR world.
- Author virtual characters that talk with your players, giving them information, exchanging items and responding to their choices.
- Design Quests for players to find particular information/items, talk with characters and collect media recordings at particular locations.
While it is currently available only on the iPhone, ARIS provides another excellent opportunity for librarians and libraries to get involved with augmented reality, mobile technology and gaming.
Hoppala, a partner of the Dutch company Layar, have just launched their new product Augmentation. Augmentation is a tool that allows someone with no technical expertise to create augmented reality experiences using images, audio, video and 3D multimedia content, as explained in the interview with Marc Rene Gardeya, Hoppala’s CEO and founder.
Why should non-technical people use your tools, next to the fact that it’s easy?
With HOPPALA! Augmentation non-technical people can concentrate on their strengths and just be creative. That’s why HOPPALA! Augmentation provides all the multimedia features supported by Layar, e.g. audio, video and 3D. Finally there is no more technical hurdle in the way. Everybody can create an account and start experimenting immediately. And it’s free!
What do you expect of augmentation in terms of layers created by non-technical people?
HOPPALA! Augmentation opens up the augmented reality community to a much wider audience and encourages engagement of creatives from different industries. I’m very excited to see creatives contributing a very new spin. Opening doors for non-techs will certainly enrich and speed up the overall content creation progress. HOPPALA! Augmentation is the incubator for a whole lot of new ideas in Augmented Reality.
Hoppala provides a valuable entry point for libraries to begin experimenting with the technology in a meaningful way, so lets see what we can do!
Layar was launched in June 2009 and this interview with Maarten Lens-FitzGerald, one of the founders and current general manager, looks at the last year and their future goals. Of particular note is Lens-FitzGerald’s mention of Bruce Sterling’s keynote, “At the Dawn of the Augmented Reality Industry“, from the Launch Event in August last year.
