Recently YDreams partnered with North American firm Canesta to produce its latest Augmented Reality 3D demo for CES 2010 in Las Vegas.
Portuguese TV program ‘Futuro Hoje’, hosted by Lourenço Medeiros, dedicated to covering the latest technology has to offer, visited the company to see for themselves what we were up to. More in the video below:
Couple of months ago I went on a field trip to visit Castelo Branco’s Environmental Center, a museum dedicated to explore the nearby International River Tagus Park (Parque Internacional do Rio Tejo).
I rode along with our Art Director and the Account Manager responsible for the project, the best tour guides one could hope for. It’s always interesting to learn how a project is born and evolves, how they nailed a particular concept or what changes they had to accommodate along the way.
Everything looked impeccable, with every application running smoothly and the industrial / interior design fitting perfectly with the environment. Our projects division is growing every year, and so is the overall quality of our interactive environments.
One of the things that I really noticed, though, were the interfaces. We’ve come a long way in designing interactive installations, and the experience we have amassed is really showing, both in programming and designing the applications.
On one hand, every installation featured a different interface, keeping things fresh and interesting for visitors, on the other hand, they were really intuitive, bringing learning curves to a minimum while featuring some neat tricks that keep users engaged.
Take the interactive table where users can learn about car tours in the region, for example. You can select and visualize different routes, and find more information about suggested points of interest. But you can also freely move the car around the map, watching it perform sharp turns and frantic racing around the map. It’s useless, yes, but still fun - and part of the experience.
I was also very curious to see how the interactive kayak would work. You hop on a real kayak, grab the paddle, and descend a section of the River tagus, projected right in front of you. You use the paddle to steer the kayak and can access multimedia information, when steering in specific directions. It works really well, and the fact that it is located in a separate room, with sound effects, scores points for immersion and learning.
There are several other installations and plenty to explore about the center, so you can either go to our website and see more pictures or, even better, go visit the center.
Go on! Give it a click or two.
The last quarter of 2009 has seen some pretty cool project rollouts, ranging from works in public parks to sprucing up medieval castle keeps!
Augmented Reality scenic viewer adds the virtual to the real
The first, inaugurated in early October, involved revamping Santarém’s Portas do Sol Garden by deploying cutting edge tools such as Augmented Reality-enabled Virtual Sightseeing units to explore the pretty surrounding landscape, interactive tables and displays for learning more about the city’s rich history as well as the Roman excavation site located right in the park, and to round things off, multimedia audio-guides for making sure no stone is left unturned.
The latter project kicked off in late November and takes us further north into Portugal’s Serra da Estrela region; the city of Guarda to be more precise, where alongside a medieval castle keep equipped with 21st century multimedia technologies by YDreams, we also conceived the brand new Visitors Center, including the scenographic design and interactive tools for investigating what the city has to offer, and the interesting archaeological finds on display at the center.
A new format for learning about old relics
Visitors Center - scenography and technology by YDreams
Espaço Guimarães is the northern Portuguese city’s most recent commercial venue. Inaugurated this past November 4th, the mall has plenty to offer shopping enthusiasts, and on hand to make sure people know exactly where to go to get what they came for, are some very sleek and stylish center directories powered by YDreams technologies and designed by Gonçalo Silva Architects.
The directories’ stunning designs are complemented by YDreams intuitive interfaces. Finding what you need is quick and easy, plus each kiosk is equipped with a built-in Job Databank that lets folks looking to apply for a position at the mall, fill in an application form with the option of posing for the perfect picture to submit along with their app!
Photos courtesy of Gonçalo Silva Arqitectos Associados
Espaço Guimarães, along with Forum Barreiro and Coimbra, is the third shopping mall in Portugal that YDreams has developed directories for. Multi Mall Management, the leading commercial developer of inner-city retail spaces in Europe, oversees 16 centers in Portugal; at this rate expect to find our kiosks at every single one of them soon!
What do YDreams, former NYC Mayor Rudolph Giuliani and Brazilian President Fernando Cardoso have in common?
All will be Guest Speakers at the 2009 edition of the Curitiba Marketing Forum!
António Câmara, company CEO and Miguel Remédio, YDreams International Operations Officer, will be addressing how companies today can use technology and interactivity to their advantage, consequently strengthening their brand and image.
Good luck to them both!
For more information about the event go to: http://www.forumdemarketingcuritiba.com.br/
UM, which means ONE in Portuguese, is Portugal’s International Festival for Experimental Inter-media. The one of its kind festival in Portugal includes exhibitions, workshops, talks, concerts, performances and public works, with internationally renowned artists, musicians, academics, designers and architects.
It starts today and carries on till Sunday, the 15th of November. UM had its debut in 2008, and is back in 2009 for its 2nd edition. YDreams has always been a fan and supporter of the festival and is taking part this year as a commercial sponsor.
For more about UM go to: http://www.1um1.net/
I had a great time at the International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality 2009 (ISMAR09). I met lots of amazing and smart people. It’s great to see the faces and talk to people I’ve been following on blogs, twitter and videos.
I’m an engineer so I like to know what makes AR “tick” but, nowadays I’ve been more interested in the interaction side of AR. The first couple of days I attended the “Science and Technology” sessions but, on the last two days, I decided to check the “Arts, Media and Humanities” sessions.
My first reaction to the “Arts, Media and Humanities” sessions was that they had little to do with AR but, I had a great time. One thing artists do very well is question the system.
I had the same feeling about the keynotes. They were great and presented by very interesting people but, were they related to Azuma’s AR definition? At the first glance, they weren’t:
Mark Mine (Walt Disney Imagineering) – Showed how a make believe world is done. (I had the chance to ride all the attractions of “Future World” at Disney Epcot and it is AWESOME.)
Natasha Tsakos (Up Wake) – Did a performance in synch with projected videos. (I did enjoy the show and had the pleasure to talk to her. She not only did the keynote but also participated in the conference and seamed honestly interested on its technological side.)
Pattie Maes (MIT Media Lab) – Presented the famous “sixth sense” project. (Some people argue that it’s not AR.)
Was the ISMAR09 organization wrong to bring these people or was it like an artist questioning the AR state of the art?
Azuma’s AR definition is correct and I agree with it from the point of view of a computer vision scientist but, is there AR beyond it?
“Sixth sense” involves a projector just like YDreams’ interactive floor projections. In the following video you can see “Virtual Garden”, one of the first applications we created.
Yesterday, YDreams and Montreal-based Green Vision Media hosted an event at YDreams’ Lisbon HQ to celebrate their new partnership and the launch of James Version 2.0 ™.
James was conceived as a personal mobile concierge service for guests to explore hotel facilities as well as the city they are visiting. Availabe in several different languages James lets you explore hotel amenities that range from restaurants and their menus to gyms and spas. You can also make reservations on the fly, send digital postcards and explore city highlights, anytime and anywhere.
The application runs on your iPhone or iPod Touch, but if you don’t have one, no worries because hotels offering the service will provide you with one to use during your stay when you check in. Furthermore, James 2.0 ™ takes the experience to another level with special add-ons that turn the iPhone into your room key!
James Version 1.0 was piloted as the first concierge service for the iPhone of its kind at the W Hotel in Montreal, Canada in December 2008. Due to its success, James 2.0 ™ the next generation of mobile concierge will be launched on October 29, 2009, and work on version 3.0 is currently underway. We’ll be sure to keep you posted.
I recently wrote about what technically Augmented Reality (AR) is all about and, this time, I’d like to express my opinion on the user experience and interactivity (or lack of it) of current AR applications.
Although AR has been around for a long time, its applications have been limited to controlled spaces and are usually costly. Only recently, thanks to the rapid evolution of computers and cellular phones, the general public has had the chance to try it out.
The release of FLARToolKit, an open-source port of ARToolKit to AS3, made this technology available to any Flash developer. It all started with GE’s “plug into the smart grid” and since then everybody is doing it. Unfortunately, most of these applications only show an object floating on top of a marker. This prompted Anatoly Zenkov to create the following sarcastic “Me too!” video:
Me too (doing some AR stuff)! from Anatoly Zenkov on Vimeo.
This raises the big question, what does augmented reality add to the current interfaces and user experience? From the online AR applications I’ve seen, not much. Check out the presentation of John Mayer’s AR video clip at the Adobe MAX 2009. Really cool, for 5 minutes. Notice that the presenter, although enjoying it and smiling, has to change hands holding the marker. Arms become heavy after a little bit in that position. Moving the marker, moves the virtual camera, allowing to see the scene from different points of view. That can also be done with a mouse, like in Street View of Google Maps. The frame rate is awful. Flash brought us back 20 years on 3D programming…
Mobile AR applications suffer from these same problems. What does it add compared to the oriented map displayed by the Maps Ap with pins for points of interest?
On the map I can better visualize distances and best routes. It’s a bit like comparing analog and digital speedometers. When looking at the pointer of an analog speedometer, even at a glimpse, it’s possible to see, current value, relative position to minimum and maximum values, rate of acceleration, etc. The digital meters are cool but most cars have the analog meters…
The user’s position when using mobile AR causes not only the “heavy arms” problems but also, like Supert3d mentions on Twitter, “using an augmented reality app in public makes me look like a real creep. Trying to see tube stations turns into pervy guy videoing girls”.
I don’t want it to sound like AR is useless. It’s quite the opposite. It’s just that, although the concept exists for a long time, real world applications are still in their infancy.
Virtual reality went through this same process in the late 90’s. It failed to deliver most of the promises but it’s still used where it makes sense. Let’s see where AR will fit in…
YDreams is also following this quest based on our experience in this and other fields. We were pioneers in the development of maps for mobile phones, one of the first location-based games for mobile phones, 140 versions of the Cristiano Ronaldo game to make sure it would run on most mobile phones, etc. And we’ve had our share of successes and failures…
There is a couple of in-depth articles about interaction design in augmented reality that I suggest reading: “Inside Out: Interaction Design for Augmented Reality” by Joe Lamantia, and “Enhancing User Interaction With First Person User Interface” by Luke Wroblewski.
Augmented Reality (AR) has been all over the web recently, but is everybody talking about the same thing? Is everybody talking about the whole scope of AR or just a subset? Even inside YDreams we disagree on some of this…Wikipedia, while not the holder of the ultimate truth, is a good place to start from. The AR definition, as of 9/30/2009 15:11 (UTC), is the following:
“Augmented reality (AR) is a term for a live direct or indirect view of a physical real-world environment whose elements are merged with-, or augmented by virtual computer-generated imagery - creating a mixed reality. The augmentation is conventionally in real-time and in semantic context with environmental elements, [...]. With the help of advanced AR technology (e.g. adding computer vision and object recognition) the information about the surrounding real world of the user becomes interactive and digitally usable.”
Well, I agree with this definition even though it might be prone to several interpretations. I’ve highlighted the parts I think are important and I’m going to explain my interpretation.
The privacy concerns prompted by the image acquisition for the Google Street View service, has been controversial and some very funny images have been captured. Recently, the Google cars were seen cruising through Portuguese roads. This time the victims were two YDreamers…
YDreams’ headquarters are located close to the beach. A big number of YDreams’ employees take advantage of this and go surfing or body boarding, early in the morning and at lunch time. These two were caught just after a morning session.
YDreams’ employees are big sports fans and practice all kinds of sports: mountain bike, BMX, tennis, skate, kiting, kite-surfing and boarding, paint ball, kart racing, etc. The headquarters are equipped with showers so that afterwards they can head back to work, fresh and smelling good… 
Karina Israel, YDreams Executive Projects Director will be giving a lecture today at ESPM-RJ (one of Latin America´s most prestigious learning institutes for Communication, Design and Administration) in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
Keeping in line with the event theme, Entertainment and Multisensory Communication, and how companies and brands use entertainment and multisensory language to attract audiences’ attention and make their communication more effective and engaging, Karina will present some of YDreams’ most emblematic cases using technologies such as Augmented Reality and gesture interaction.
The event, organized by ESPM-RJ through its R&D lab in Media, Entertainment, Design and Artistic Interventions and Globo University, is part of the Entertainment and Contemporary Culture Consortium’s 6th edition debate cycle.
We’re sure the turn out will be great. Good luck to you Karina.
More info at www.espm.br/cecc
António Câmara will be one of the featured speakers at this year’s addition of PICNIC, underway in Amsterdam from the 23rd to the 25th of September.
António Câmara´s presentation, focusing on Augmented Cities, will explore how Augmented Reality (AR) as a platform can bring new life to cities using a ‘Powers to Ten’ approach: Augmented Reality used on a micro-scale to visualize the intricate workings of utility networks; at an intermediate scale using virtual sightseeing units, and other digital signage; and at the macro-scale with large scale interactive projections.
This however will not be YDreams first visit to PICNIC Amsterdam. The company was represented by Eduardo Dias, company co-founder, at the event for the first time back in 2007; Eduardo Dias, along with NY-based Brand Experience Lab’s (BEL) David Polinchock, gave a presentation about the future of Augmented Reality in Advertising. The meeting of ideas and strategies later led to a partnership with BEL and the creation of Audience Entertainment, a joint-venture to deliver interactive videogames for theaters, stadiums, music venues and others around the globe. The company’s work in AR presented at PICNIC ‘07 also caught the attention of the Economist giving way to an article in their Technology Quarterly December 2007 edition.
PICNIC is a unique, three-day festival and inspiring conference complimented by a set of networking events and hands-on technology experiences for top creatives and innovation professionals in business, technology, new media, entertainment, science and the arts.
The event draws a wide audience, from heads of business, government leaders, marketers, artists, designers, producers, investors, scientists and innovators.
For more info: http://www.picnicnetwork.org/page/20753/en
Charming and historical Monsanto, dubbed ‘the most Portuguese village in all of Portugal’ has a new claim to fame: it is the first town in the country to offer visitors and tourists an outdoor audio-guide system for exploring the town’s numerous highlights.
The audio-guide system developed by YDreams, runs on GPS-enabled PDAs that feature up to 24 points of interest in Monsanto. Visitors to the village no longer need to navigate the streets with confusing paper maps; instead the system’s integrated GPS technology automatically detects points of interest that are within the visitors’ range and triggers audio narrations, and displays additional images about each one.
Monsanto Audio Guides are managed and rented out to visitors by Edeventos, a local events organization firm. The amount of information provided by the audio-guide is incomparable to using a traditional map or guidebook, plus they come in three languages and there is even a version developed especially for children.
In the meantime, YDreams is currently working on a next-gen audio-guide, which aside from incorporating GPS and compass, will also integrate augmented reality technology to liven things up even more. So globe-trekkers, stay tuned – a new reality may be right around the corner in a town or city near you.
Check out the video below for a better look at the audio-guide in action (coverage in Portuguese):
Yesterday Bruce Sterling referenced our augmented reality scenic viewer on his blog! Bruce commented that “it was Interesting to see a kiosk application. If you can call that device a kiosk.”
And of course it is so much more than an average kiosk. Dubbed a virtual sightseeing scenic viewer, the totem-like device spins 360º and features a built-in screen and webcam that captures and displays exactly what you see before you on the screen in real-time. The magic resides in the fact that it uses augmented reality to merge virtual digital elements such as video, text and images with real live points in the landscape. Imagine aiming the scenic viewer at the Bastille in Paris and being able to watch a 3D historical recreation of the angry mobs storming the fortress-prison during the French revolution! The possibilities are endless and the Virtual Sightseeing scenic viewer has the capacity to make it real.
Below a video of our first scenic viewer deployed at Pinhel Castle in central Portugal back in 2005:
Lisbon’s National Pantheon also hosts our augmented reality scenic viewer:
Just got back from the U.S. after presenting the paper “YVision: A General Purpose Software Composition Framework” at the HCII2009 conference.
Many of natural user interfaces (NUI) use cameras to detect the presence of people, objects, markers, etc. This type of applications are very complex as it may include many computer science subjects like, computer vision, real-time 3D graphics, real-time physics simulation, artificial inteligence and multi-threading.
There are many libraries like OpenCV, OGRE and ODE, that resolve some of these problems but, how can we integrate all them into an easy to develop and easy to customize environment.
YVision is a platform developed by YDreams’ R&D group (YLabs) and used by YDreams’ production for the last 3 years. Many dozens of applications for our customers have been developed on it and we recently released version 3.0.
It is fully developed in C# and fully integrated into Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 (project and item templates, code snippets, IntelliSense, reference documentation) making it very productive for the developers.
Although the platform was primarily developed for NUI applications, it was kept open enough to be used on many other scenarios. We are currently using it to simulate and control robots. This is why we call it “general purpose”.
HCII2009 is a conference dedicated to several aspects of human-computer interaction. The paper was reviewed, accepted for the Rapid User Interface Prototyping (RUIP) session and published on “Human-Computer Interaction. New Trends”.
The presentation slides can be found at SlideShare.
YDreams’ Solidarity Movement has been up and running since 2007; the initiative involves raising funds and donations (such as clothing, books, CDs, bikes, computers, DVDs and so forth) from the folks at the company. The donations are then channeled to those who most need them through Solidarity and Charity Institutes in the Lisbon area.
The text below in Portuguese, courtesy of our HR department, explains in greater detail the aim and results of the project. The pics below tell the rest of the story.
“Decorreu mais uma edição, a 3ª consecutiva, do YDreams Solidarity, um projecto iniciado em 2007 pelos Recursos Humanos da YDreams. O grande objectivo deste projecto é anualmente proporcionar a pelo menos uma instituição de solidariedade, a oportunidade a todos os que por lá vivem, uma vida um pouco melhor, um dia repleto de alegria. Assim, é pedido a todos os YDreamers, que tragam roupas, livros, CDs, aparelhagens, bicicletas, computadores, DVDs, etc, no fundo tudo o que já nos foi útil e que hoje podemos e queremos dar ao próximo.
The Barroso EcoMuseum in Montalaegre (northern Portugal) offers visitors to the region an insight into what makes their culture special and unique. The recently inaugurated museum collection is by nature traditional, however the way they’ve chosen to convey information to visitors is not.
The picture below features a wall of regional riches that represent much about the people of Montealegre. Objects on display range from work tools and arts and crafts to musical instruments and religious relics.
A few meters from the wall stand two interactive modules that YDreams conceived and developed specifically to explore the wall of Montalegre artifacts.
All visitors do is look into the screens displaying a real-time image of the wall of artifacts beyond. Tags indicating the name of each object appear next to the item on the screen; visitors then tap the screen over their item of choice to trigger additional information in the form of text and images about the objects that interest them most.
Pretty cool huh? An interactive Food Wheel, characteristic of the region of course, follows in August so stay tuned.
For more information about the company, visit:
Enquiries and opinions are welcome at:
pr(at)ydreams.com
