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.’
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:
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!
Today at 18h00, the first of four conferences by our CEO, António Câmara is underway at Lisbon’s arts and culture center, Culturgest. The talks will revolve around his visions for future public spaces, collective intelligence, intelligent objects and future forms of communication.
The remaining conferences will take place on the 17th, 24th and 31st of March also at 18h00. Entry is free so stop by if your are curious!
Our own Antão Almada (Strategic Software Development Director) gave a very detailed talk at Universidad de Extremadura for a course on the international development of videogames using open source software.
The video presentation offers up an extensive compilation of Augmented Reality applications and how they are developed, amongst others.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 theirTechnology 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.
YVision, developed in-house by YLabs, our R&D center, is an advanced programming platform that creates powerful interactive multimedia applications that combine technologies such as 3D, physics simulation, computer graphics and gesture interaction, in a stable and efficient environment.
Mayors William Wynn and and António Costa, of the cities of Austin and Lisbon, respectively, will be presiding over the launch of the Creative Cities Network in the Portuguese capital on July 7th at the Portuguese Pavilion at Parque das Nações.
Those were my exact thoughts whenIvan Franco, our R&D Director, told me he was off to Lisbon’s Electricity Museum to give a talk at Pecha Kucha Night about interaction design, its potential consequences and how it relates to the work we do here at YDreams.
Well, the name alone was enough to trigger my curiosity, especially because I thought he was referring to some vanguard Karaoke trend or something (I’m a big fan )…but no, Pecha Kucha (which is Japanese for conversation) is a “patented system where each presenter is allowed 20 images, each shown for 20 seconds each – giving participants 6 minutes 40 seconds of fame before the next presenter is up. This keeps presentations concise, the interest level up, and gives more people the chance to show.”
The Japanese have long been known for reducing the subject to its necessary elements. In this case they inspired Astrid Klein and Mark Dytham, ‘founders’ of Pecha Kucha Night to take minimalism beyond design and architecture, and the Pecha Kucha system seems to be catching on just fine, having so far spread virally to close to 200 cities in little over six years.
This year the European Commission is organizing the first ever European SME (Small and medium enterprises) week from the 6th to the 14th of May in Brussels. The week will promote entrepreneurial spirit and emphasize the contribution of entrepreneurs to the European economy. To mark the occasion, the EC has published a brochure with portraits of entrepreneurs from each of the 33 countries participating in SME week.
The goal of the brochure is to serve as a guideline to aspiring entrepeuneurs and to highlight the challenges and excitement of running one’s own business, and we are thrilled to anounce that our CEO, António Câmara, has been nominated by national and European experts to figure in the brochure for Portugal!
Opening day for the 1st European SME Week will kick off with an exhibition entitled “The SME experience – How it feels to be an entrepreneur” with all 33 successful entrepreneurs on hand to tell their stories, an art installation where visitors can experience a day in the life of an entrepreneur, and a ‘Portraits Hall of Fame’ complete with interactive touch screens for exploring each nominees’ portrait. Visitors to the event will range from journalists to groups of students interested in entrepreneurism.
Last week a YDreams’ team travelled to Cannes, France with one objective – show the TV and Entertainment content industry some of the coolest technology out there.
It all started on Tuesday afternoon – while the Grand Auditorium of the Palais des Congrès in Cannes filled up and waited for Sir Martin Sorrell’s keynote, everybody had the chance to interact with the virtual bubbles that filled the screen.
Later that evening we set up another interactive installation, this time at Digital Creative Party at the Carlton Hotel. The lively party was the perfect setting for our interactive waterfall, where guests could play with the water effect and splash each other.
The last event of the week consisted in the session Experience This! Content 360 Technology Showcase. Among several remarkable panellists and in front of a packed room, YDreams presented 3 real time demos that got the audience going.
The first one was our mind reader application that allowed us to add thought bubbles to our panellists for a few minutes (we found out that they all loved Cannes and thought YDreams rocked!). Our second live demo consisted in a shower of cubes, which the whole audience could play with. Last but not least we showcased SpaceDog, Audience Entertainment’s latest game, which debuted at Cannes. The audience was invited to raise and lower their arms, acting as a human joystick that guided SpaceDog safely to his Bone Planet objective.
The presentation ended with a showing of the Augmented Reality Interactive Playground featuring YDreams’ famous mascot Flapi. The audience was excited to find out that YDreams technology can mean inviting your favourite virtual character into your living room, as well as letting a real character become part of a fictional world, all of it in real time. We call it the future of television. I look forward to us making it happen sooner, rather than later.:)
YDreams’ CEO, António Câmara, Ivan Franco and Inês Henriques sat down with ‘Falar Global’, a program on SIC Notícias. which looks at the impact information and knowledge technologies have on our daily lives.
The interview covers a range of topics that include YDreams’ take on what we can expect from televisions of the future, as well as the company’s work in the field of augmented reality, and in transforming the objects and surfaces around us into screens people can interact with.
I always download the “This Week” show, with Dan Fernandez and Brian Keller, onto my portable player and listen to it during my commute. They mentioned the “Show Off” contest on one of the last episodes and I thought it was a great opportunity to literally ‘show off’ YDreams at the Microsoft MIX09 event.
I was busy and left it for later but after a sleepless night preparing a presentation, I suddenly noticed it was the last day to submit a video, so instead of going to bed, I screen captured a couple of demos we’d made using our YVision platform, quickly edited the video on Movie Maker and sent it off.
Only after receiving an email from Dan the following day, ‘asking if the video had no audio’, did I notice that I had an extra day (I had read the deadline date after midnight, thus the date mix-up!) The good news was that I had time to find a great song in Jamendo, add it to the video and re-submit it (thanks Dan).
The honorable mention awarded the video, by our peers at MIX09, goes directly to the great team that YDreams is. Their commitment to excellence allowed me to create this video in just a couple of hours.
check out the video below to see what the experience was all about:
