YDreams Brasil’s latest interactivity project involves gorgeous butterflies – virtual ones that is! The Virtual Butterfly Gallery, crafted for a permanent exhibition on butterflies native to the Atlantic rain forest in Rio de Janeiro state, inaugurated this past July 30th at Quitandina Palace in Petropolis, an historical city nestled in the forested hills north of Rio de Janeiro.
The exhibition was sponsored and put together by SESC (Social Services for Merchant Commerce) a non-profit Brazilian institute founded in 1946 that caters to the social well-being of mercantile and service industry professionals and their families. SESC organizes activities related to areas such as education, health, recreation, and culture.
YDreams solutions for the exhibit include butterflies of all shapes and colors projected onto a leaf-like sculpture that react as visitors approach by fluttering about and away. Visitors are also treated to eight 32” touch screen totems that feature extensive information about the different species, as well as the chance to create their own virtual butterfly, which they can then email to friends and family.
The videos below are two good examples of YDreams’ versatility and scope in producing projects for sectors as diverse as environmental education and awareness and retail.
The first, inaugurated in Julho 2009, is the Castelo Branco Environmental Interpretation Center, a space that offers visitors new and exciting ways to explore the nearby International Tagus River Park (Parque Internacional do Rio Tejo):
The second clip depicts the work we did to infuse some interactivity into the shopping experience at Salsa, a retail store at Colombo Shopping Center in Lisbon:
If you happen to be in Portugal, take some time to experience both!
Miguel Remédio, YDreams Co-Founder and International Operations Executive interviewed (minute 2:36) by RTP International TV show at AICEP sponsored event at the Portuguese Consulate in San Francisco that brought together Portuguese companies and individuals doing business and R&D in the USA.
YLabs, our in-house R&D lab is proud to announce the release of its YVision Closed-Beta Version for testing by a number of selected applicants.
A little over a month ago we invited folks interested in testing our proprietary development platform, code-named YVision, to register and apply for a ‘test-drive’. After a thorough selection we narrowed down the list and yesterday the version was officially released for testing.
The YVision SDK is available for download at http://www.ydreams.com/yvision; keep in mind you must be an authorized user in order to download it, but feel free to skim the page for a better understanding of what YVision really is.
Last September YDreams released Flyar, a screensaver, Twitter visualization application that used Augmented Reality and gesture interaction to enable users to see themselves in real time, inside a pc screen, surrounded by virtual birds that fluttered about or flew towards them to deliver incoming tweets. Through simple flicks of the hand, users could play around with the virtual content by “calling” a bird over to deliver a message, or cause leaves to fall from the trees.
The app was downloaded and enjoyed by thousands of curious followers over the past year. As of yesterday, July 21st, YVision Closed-Beta version has stepped in where Flyar left off! We hope you enjoy it just as much!
Karina Israel, Ydreams Brasil’s Executive Director’s live presentation on Augmented Reality (AR) at TEDxSudeste in Rio de Janeiro this past May has opened up many doors in Brazil and the requests for presentations on the exciting field of AR abound.
Today, Karina will be giving a talk on AR for an audience of 200 at Jornal Golobo, and tomorrow, the 17th of July, she will be a guest speaker at Interact 2010, an international conference on Digital Creativity. Both events will take place in Rio de Janeiro and the theme will focus on how to apply Augmented Reality creatively.
(The BTEK project is particularly close to the hearts of our fellow YDreamers over in Barcelona, as well as our neighboring country. Therefore the post that follows is in English and Spanish.)
Last year we announced the official kickoff of the BTEK Interpretation Center project; this past June 9th it was officially inaugurated and is now open for business!
YDreams conceived and delivered 24 interactive solutions and two sound environments that welcome visitors before entering the center until they reach the first hall. Ain3Team studio was responsible for the interior design and exhibition scenography.
We collaborated closely with the Elhuyar Foundation, the entity responsible for managing and overseeing the project from start to finish. We developed all contents for our interactive installations, contents that ranged from computing and consumer electronics to communications, the Internet and the social implications technological development has on product life cycles. The significant deployment of technology and creativity involved the concerted efforts of a team of over 15 professionals, as well as artists and external studios, which after many months rendered a result we are all extremely proud of.
Technologies employed included Augmented Reality, image processing and gesture based technologies, as well as effects such as 3D contents, illustrations, videos, sound and musical theme creation. In addition to this furniture to support the numerous apps had to be designed, adapted and assembled as is the case of the sci-fi ‘Gene Workshop’!
Take a look at the video below for a peek into the BTEK Technology Interpretation Center:
Al inicio del año pasado anunciábamos el comienzo de los trabajos en este proyecto.
El Centro BTEK se inauguró el pasado día 9 de Junio. Para lo que es el primer centro de interpretación de la tecnología del País Vasco, ubicado en el Parque Tecnológico de Bizkaia, en Zamudio (en las afueras de Bilbao), hemos entregado 24 soluciones interactivas, además de 2 ambientes sonoros que acompañan a los visitantes desde el exterior mismo del Centro hasta la primera sala.
El diseño del museo ha estado a cargo del estudio ain3Team
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En colaboración y bajo la dirección de la Fundación Elhuyar, responsable de la dirección de proyecto, fuimos responsables por todos los contenidos científicos de nuestras instalaciones, en temas como la computación, electrónica de consumo, comunicaciones, Internet, las implicaciones sociales del desarrollo tecnológico o el ciclo de vida de los productos.
El importante despliegue tecnológico y creativo ha implicado a un equipo de más de 15 profesionales, así como artistas y estudios externos, a lo largo de muchos meses, en un esfuerzo conjunto del cual estamos muy orgullosos.
Se han aplicado realidad aumentada, procesamiento de imagen y tecnologías basadas en gestos, la Wii de Nintendo, contenidos 3D, ilustraciones, vídeos, efectos sonoros y temas musicales. El paquete se completa con el diseño industrial y montaje de algunas piezas de mobiliario, como la Célula (”Taller de Genes”), así como las componentes mecánicas y electrónicas de diversas soluciones.
Más info en la página de YDreams. Vídeo del Centro, cortesía de Teknopolis. PDF con fotos y descripciones de todas las soluciones.
James(TM) is a mobile application catered specifically to the needs of travelers and hotel guests. It pretty much enables guests to find all sorts of information about the hotel and local area while also accessing interactive concierge services. James(TM) applications are cross-compatible with mobile platforms, allowing guests to access hotel information and services even when they are not in their rooms.
Recently GVM announced a partnership with LodgeNet Interactive, a leading provider of media and connectivity solutions for the hospitality industry, and Sqaure Group, a premium Apple Reseller, to ensure that James (TM) become a staple service in in-room entertainment systems at some of the world’s most prestigious hotel chains.
Through an exclusive agreement between Lodgenet and GVM, James(TM) the Lifestyle Concierge wil be made available to hotel guests via LodgeNet’s Premium IPTV solution, which also integrates the Apple® Mac mini in the rooms to provide guests with interactive services and Web browsing.
LodgeNet operates in the United States, Canada and México, serving close to 1.9 million hotel rooms, thereby reaching close to 500 million travelers annually. Sqaure Group covers Europe as the United Kingdom’s largest Apple Reseller. By incorporating James(TM) into their service offerings, the ‘LifeStyle Concierge’ is well on its way to becoming a unique global product in the hospitality sector.
We are happy to announce that we are offering users worldwide access to our proprietary development platform, code-named YVision.
You can find the registration form along with additional information at http://www.ydreams.com/yvisionbeta/ so register now because the offer is limited to a number of users.
As we may only accept a limited number of applications, you will have to convince us that you are the right person. Use the “What you would like to do with YVision?” field on the form to persuade us you are the right candidate!
YVision was developed by a dedicated team of professionals, who have been continuously improving the application since 2005. The platform is the motor behind more than 300 interactive solutions the company have developed over the years for clients the world over.
Since 2000 Augmented Reality (AR) has been one of YDreams’ technological focuses. We believe that this technology can be very useful to design groundbreaking interactive experiences and become a real game-changer in the way we use technology everyday.
Although we’ve been working in the field for some years, most recently AR has been extremely hyped as the next big thing and is finally a target of public attention. VCs are eager to invest, brands perceive a real market value and better technology platforms are being announced everyday.
The proof to all of this is that this year a group of companies decided to organize the first commercial Augmented Reality Event: ARE 2010. The conference gathered the most important players to exchange ideas, promote their products and showcase their latest tech breakthroughs. YDreams was invited to participate and we setup a showcase booth, did two public talks and participated in the Auggie demo awards.
Bruce Sterling interacting with YDreams' demo
The feedback from people was excellent. It was good to observe that all of the companies understand the importance of talking instead of turning our backs on each other. We all want the technology to grow in a sustainable way and more then selling and promoting ideas at an event like this, everyone wanted to discuss issues like potential markets, standards, user-experience or any other multiple good practices. It’s great to observe diversity and how everybody is thinking about AR from different perspectives.
We’ve come a long way since the days when we interacted with computers Using solely Command Line Interfaces (CLI) and later Graphical User Interfaces (GUI). There is real hope that the new wave of Natural User Interfaces (NUI) will provide a much more natural way for interacting with computers that will draw upon paradigms of the surrounding world. The users will have lower adaptation thresholds to computers and these will evolute to become more and more efficient for daily tasks. AR will definitely play an important role in this revolution, because ultimately it is trying to merge the real and the virtual in a seam less manner.
As for the event, we received very good feedback for our work at YDreams. People understand that we are not only concerned about technology, but also on how to develop good interaction design, where “content is king” and “clever is better than wow”.
We are also very proud to announce that we won the Auggie demo competition, where we showed our latest demo using Canesta’s technology. We clearly stated that it was not a product demo but a conceptual tech demo. One that shows how we’d like to think about the future of this technology: a perfect combination of NUI and AR, that will help democratize the future of computing by providing intuitive and engaging forms of interaction.
Ori Inbar hands Ivan Franco YDreams Auggie Award
Finally we’d like to thank the ARE 2010 sponsors and organizers and all of the people we met in the last days. It was a real joy to see us all come together with one common purpose.
A group of Augmented Reality (AR) industry leaders have gotten together to organize the first ever AR Industry event on June 2 – 3, in Santa Clara, U.S.A. The event, which will focus on industry and practice, will include keynote speakers like Bruce Sterling, reputed fiction writer and leading AR thinker, amongst others.
In the wake of YDreams and Canesta’s recent announcement to partner ‘to take Augmented Reality mainstream’, we couldn’t possibly miss this event, so our own Ivan Franco, YDreams R&D Director, will be on hand as an event speaker to talk about how he feels ‘augmented reality will change the way we market and use products, communicate and entertain ourselves, and how together with Canesta, we look forward to making augmented reality a part of everyday life.’
“Augmented reality will change the way we market and use products, communicate and entertain ourselves,” said Ivan Franco YDreams´ R&D Director. “But, to date, implementing augmented reality solutions has only been possible with very specialized techniques. By working together with Canesta, we look forward to making augmented reality a part of everyday life.”
YDreams has been working on Natural User Interfaces (NUI) for more than 9 years for some of the largest corporations in the world. To do this, the company has developed a sophisticated proprietary software platform, combining multiple advanced technologies such as computer vision, physics simulation, artificial intelligence and several others.
“One of the most difficult aspects of designing NUI applications has been to create a sense of real world interactions. We envision consumers naturally browsing through digital catalogs, adding to the user experience of ecommerce or being inside movies, delivered by IPTV platforms.”
Until now Augmented Reality has delivered limited applications to the general public, mostly offering 3-D objects on top of visually obtrusive markers. By using Canesta’s 3-D vision sensors, YDreams applications can do real-time capture of any object in 3-D, without the aid of any special markers or enhancements. “This completely changes the scope of where and how augmented reality can be used, said Franco.
“YDreams is among the world’s leading organizations in developing augmented reality experiences,” said Jim Spare, president and CEO of Canesta. “By combining our mass market 3-D input sensors with YDreams’ expertise, we will see broad uses of these formerly very specialized applications. This will change how immersive and realistic so many kinds of communications and interactions will become.”
A video of a democan be viewed on YDreams’ official YouTube channel and it will be possible to experience the technology live at the ARE2010 event (augmentedrealityevent.com) on June 2-3, in Santa Clara, CA.
This past March, Vale and Rio de Janeiro’s Archdiocese began work to restore and preserve the city’s iconic Christ the Redeemer statue.
To celebrate the initiative Vale and the Archdiocese are giving people from around the world the chance to win a little piece of the statue, and also developed a hot-site to promote the monument’s restoration called ‘Para Sempre Cristo Redentor’, which includes an Augmented Reality (AR) component developed by YDreams.
The technically improved AR marker, printable via the website, features an additional bonus; as visitors hold the AR marker up in front of a webcam specific points of interest are displayed on the virtual 3D statue. By clicking the mouse over each point, visitors can access detailed information about each one.
Furthermore, the YDreams app automatically detects whether the computer being used to navigate the site has a a webcam or not. If not it adapts by enabling users to rotate the 3D model using a mouse. In addition, it automatically displays a model of the monument with hotspots, if the user does not have the compatible version of Flash installed.
To explore Christ the Redeemer Statue using YDreams AR, click HERE.
Karina Israel, YDreams Brasil’s Executive Director, does an excellent job of demystifying Augmented Reality at Rio de Janeiro’s independently organized TED event. Through a mix of humor, simplicity and anecdotes she explains and showcases concrete examples of AR applications YDreams has developed over the years, forecasts where AR is going and gives concrete examples of its future uses
Take a look at the live video below (in Portuguese). Keep in mind that it may take a bit to kick off because of streaming.
About a month ago we cued you into the Skol Sensation event in São Paulo, Brazil, where YDreams would be debuting their first augmented reality t-shirts. In case you didn’t make it to the event check out the video below to see what the experience was all about:
The ‘Family Blue Park’ conceived by YDreams for Gas Natural, one of Europe’s principal energy companies, inaugurated this past April 20th at the Dolce Vita Tejo Shopping Center on the outskirts of Lisbon. The theme park is comprised of interactive technologies that engage children through a series of games and activities that foster environmental awareness and teach energy efficiency.
The venue, geared at children between the ages of 6 and 10, is packed with interactive solutions that are fun and didactic. Activities on hand include interactive quizzes and games that simulate day to day situations in the home such as choosing the right kind of light bulbs, or selecting the most effective cycle on the washing machine. Other activities include blowing on miniature fan-blades or learning to use solar panels to generate renewable energies such as solar, wind and hydro.
The ‘Family Blue Park’, located in Dolce Vita Tejo’s central plaza, is open to the public daily through May 7th from 10h00 to 22h00. The park also welcomes and schedules daily school trips from all over Portugal.
To round off the theme park’s inauguration, Gas Natural held an awards ceremony for the winners of the Enerfixe competition an online game also developed by YDreams in 2009, to promote energy consumption awareness amongst children and young adults. The initiative brings together the ten top players and close to 200 of their respective classmates.
Have a peek at the video below, courtesy of TV Energia:
YDreams has been working on natural user interfaces (NUI) for around 9 years. We’ve been using primarily web-cameras for the detection of people and objects, as these are non-intrusive and are a very rich multi-vector sensor.
In the beginning each new application was a copy-paste of source from the previous projects plus, all the customization code and a few more features. As you can imagine, maintenance was a nightmare. From very early on, we felt the need to have a reusable development framework. It would allow us to take less time developing the applications, make them more robust and leave us time to keep innovating. As a result, we have successfully deployed hundreds of applications for our customers, which you can find in museums, stores, events and movie theaters.
The resulting framework also allows us to share our knowledge across the development process. We have great people that are very good at different areas of expertise but we cannot have all of them working on every project. Their knowledge is added to the framework to be used by others. It includes multi-threading, image processing, tracking, 3D real-time graphics and physics, artificial intelligence, Free Frame plugins, Flash integration into 3D graphics, USB, FireWire and IP (Ethernet) video cameras, Microsoft Surface support, etc.
The platform is used in almost all our interactive applications and recently was used on the robots we created for Santander. The platform allowed us to have a 3D simulation of their behaviors even before we had the physical robots. The exact same code that was used in the simulator is now running in the robots themselves.
We recently partnered with Canesta and added support for their time-of-flight depth-sensing video cameras. These cameras can detect the distance of the real objects to the camera.
We already had interactive applications combining real and virtual in real-time. Now it is also registered in 3D, fully complying with the augmented reality definition by Azuma.
This is just one more feature added to many others in the framework. Creating the demo was very simple. Its objective was to show the capabilities of the camera and also perform the first usability tests. We wanted to know how users would perceive the “invisible” 3D objects and what type of interactions are possible. It has been a big success with all the users.
Visit our booth at ARE2010 to try this demo yourself and get more details on our framework.
Ivan Franco, the Portuguese company’s I&D Director was invited to take part in three leading international events: Emerging Communications (eComm), and Screen Media Expo, dedicated to the telecom and mobile communications, and digital signage industries respectively, and the Augmented Reality Event (are2010), the first global event for advancing the business of augmented reality
Ivan Franco will showcase some of YDreams’ most groundbreaking advances in Augmented Reality technology that will, in a very near future, enable us to manipulate 3D structures, drive virtual cars in a real-time sports event, or interact directly with contents on a movie screen. All of these amazing applications will depend on a number of technology and design capabilities, which Ivan will explore in his talks.
The first of the events, eComm, will take place at the San Francisco Airport Marriott (USA) April 19-21. Ivan’s session entitled Advancing AR – Beyond Labels is scheduled for April 21st at 10:05 a.m. Up next is the Screen Media Expo at Earls Court in London, May 5-6, where YDreams will mark its presence at the Futurology sessions, dedicated to looking into the technologies, approaches and methods that will shape the screen media and out of home markets in the next 1,000 days. Rounding things off is Ivan’s participation in are2010, the inaugural event dedicated to advancing the business of augmented reality, held at Santa Clara Convention Center (USA) June 2-3.
If you are planning on attending this year’s Skol Sensation Electronic Music event in São Paulo, Brazil, expect to run into some very cool Augmented Reality (AR) experimentation by YDreams. To do so you’ll need an AR Tee, encoded with special markers. The tees (see below) are already on sale at five shopping centers in São Paulo (city); stop on by one of the malls to see what its all about or pick one up! In the meantime, here’s a preview (see YouTube Video as well.)
AR Tee featuring encoded marker
Pose for the camera and watch as your AR-Tee comes alive!
