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.

Cheers
Ivan

Tags: ARE 2010, Auggie Award, augmented reality, YDreams 3D Demo

This entry was posted on Saturday, June 5th, 2010 at 0:02 and is filed under Events, augmented reality. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.