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:

YDreams will be presenting its YVision platform at HCI International 2009 in San Diego California on the 22nd of July in the conference’s “Rapid User Interface Prototyping” session.

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.

YVision has enabled us to come up with some pretty cool apps like Playing in an Augmented World (which won an Honorable Mention at the Mix09 Showoff contest) and this one featuring promising tennis hopeful Patricia Martins in some one on one with YVision.

I recently learned that Pedro Alvares Cabral, the man who commanded the Portuguese armada that ‘happened’ upon Brazil, hailed from Belmonte – a small, charming town in north-central Portugal.

The town decided it was time they had a space exclusively dedicated to the Portuguese era of the discoveries – they called it Centro Interpretative de Belmonte. They also called on YDreams to add their special brand of creative technology to this singular museum space.

I was recently there with a film crew to get footage of the center, and not wanting to sound biased or anything, I’ve got to say that all parts involved (YDreams with all the interactive design components, conception and narrative and Pitanga Design with the scenography) did a fantastic job in recreating an unparalleled journey into the era of Portuguese discoveries, and the armada’s first encounters with the new world.

Exploring Belmonte’s Interpretive Center was a lot like a trip to a theme park with the historical contents of course - a treat for kids of all ages. The scenography combined with the design and amazing gesture-based apps made the narrative exciting and alot of fun to explore.

Some of my favorite apps include a huge screen projection that displays and plays the instruments used in popular Brazilian music genres like Samba, Bossa Nova and Chorinho. Arrows on the floor in front of the projection tell you where to step, skip or dance about to ‘magically’ turn the instruments on and off, or create your own unique combination of cool sounds.

In the room next door another interactive app recreates the vibrant pace and sounds of a traditional Brazilian market stall. Wooden paddles with special markers let you see yourself alongside the colorful fruits and vegetables native to the region in a large-sized plasma in front of you.

There is plenty to keep you informed and entertained but don’t take my word alone, pack the family and friends into a car and head over to Belmonte to see for yourself!

For a brief teaser, or if you can’t make it there anytime soon, have a look at what’s on in Belmonte in the video below.

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.

For more see video!

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.

Have a look as one of our YLabbies tests some YVision-based apps on Magalhães (the made-in-Portugal classmate pc) with an Intel(R) Atom(TM) N270 CPU @ 1.60GHz and an Intel(R) 945 Express chipset.

Camera-based interaction on a netbook from YDreams on Vimeo.

Very cool presentation by Ori Inbar, from Games Alfresco, on Augmented Reality.

Here.

Thought I’d a round-up on interesting things recently posted by YDreamers on our internal mail forums.

Intellectual property has been a hot issue this week, as it becomes more and more relevant to YDreams’ strategy, starting with William Patry’s announcement that he was going to shut down his excellent blog about Copyright issues. IBM’s thorough IP strategy (as this example well illustrates) was also on the discussion table.

With a couple of upcoming YDreams projects related with interactive urban furniture and environments, we couldn’t help noticing REACTIVATE!!, a really interesting looking exhibition, dealing with the concept of Instant Urbanism. (via we make money not art)

We don’t do robots, but that doesn’t mean we don’t find them cool.

Data visualization is such an interesting area, especially when working with interfaces and information design, with results that go from annoying garble to stunning functionality. Take a look at this article about the ‘most interesting modern approaches to data visualization‘, some really great trends here.

To round things off, a well-polished (and funny) look at the ‘Unfulfilled Promises of Virtual Reality‘, all the way up to Augmented Reality.

Flapi, our in-house Augmented Reality mascot, is in the spotlight again. After a high-profile stint at Engadget, this time Flapi stars in an Exame Informática (a Portuguese leading IT magazine) article and video.

You can find the video below, where Ivan Franco, our R&D Director, talks about YDreams’ work with Augmented Reality, and showcases Flapi and the Interactive Bubbles (in portuguese):

Games Alfresco has just referenced YDreams’ SimVideo as one of the top 10 Augmented Reality engines around (post). The blog is dedicated to the pursuit of the ultimate augmented reality game, and features a lot of information about AR and related developments. Jump to gamesalfresco.com for more.

YDreams’ Flapi movie has been recently featured on popular tech blog - Engadget, so I thought I’d give you a little insight into our latest Augmented Reality project.

Following other YDreams’ products with AR, such as the Virtual Sightseeing Scenic Viewer and augmented books, SimVideo extends the possibilities of these technology applications by providing a large set of tracking, simulation and composition functionalities with very low hardware requirements, due to a very powerful proprietary platform.

With this technology we envision applications such as real time competition with F1 drivers during a Grand Prix Tv transmission, the re-enactment of famous movies, performing alongside or replacing ones favourite actors (imagine Woody Allen´s Broadway Danny Rose inverted) and an enormous variety of augmented reality applications.

With SimVideo, video feeds that are either live or pre-recorded can gain new levels of interest through the addition of an individual layer of contextualized interactivity.

SimVideo implements static and dynamic occlusion, static and dynamic shadow casting, collision detection and physics.

Related experiences have demonstrated real characters interacting with virtual objects, new developments already undertaken in SimVideo are leading to virtual characters affecting and controlling real world objects. Soon one will be able to see Flapi turning real lights on and off and other real world objects controlled by virtual characters.

The main idea is merging real and virtual life in a seamless universe that tends to become one.

And if you haven’t seen the video:

Microsoft Techdays, one of the biggest tech-events in Portugal, is underway at the Lisbon Congress Center from the 11th to the 14th of March. The four-day event is aimed at “IT professionals, programmers and students” in related fields and is expected to draw over 2000 visitors.

YDreams will be on hand with their ubiquitous Magic Book, a yWalk (interactive floor projection) and one of their latest developments yFaces, an augmented reality-based app that manages to positively surprise users everywhere.

YDreamer Pedro Matos will be participating in a key-note speech about Virtual Coast, a prototype developed by the creative technology provider that runs on Microsoft’s Virtual Earth platform, and will be used by IGP (the Portuguese Geographic Institute) to develop a series of next-generation geographical applications. Antão Almada, from YLabs, the company’s R&D unit, will also give a talk about “building support infra-structures and applications for events such as Techdays” tomorrow at 17:15 in Room A7.

Techdays 2008, March 11th - 14th
Venue: Lisbon Congress Center (Centro de Congressos de Lisboa) Portugal

More information: www.techdays.pt

On the 28th of September, Eduardo gave a conference at Picnic’07 about Augmented Reality. The event had some considerable media exposure and apparently caught the eye of Ben Sutherland, a journalist from The Economist, who was preparing a piece about Augmented Reality. The reporter called up YDreams wanting to know more about our work in Augmented Reality. The Virtual Sightseeing caught their eye.

What ensued was a mention in the Technology Quarterly edition of one of the most renowned newspapers in the world, er, yes, The Economist is a newspaper =) :

‘Augmented enjoyment’

“The technology also has less serious uses, however. YDreams, a marketing and digital-media firm in Lisbon, Portugal, has developed an AR sightseeing viewer called VSS. The first such machine, bolted atop a battlement on the 12th-century Pinhel Castle in north-eastern Portugal, delights tourists who tilt it up, down and around for an augmented view of the castle and its surroundings. Place names and explanatory text are superimposed over objects seen through the viewer’s screen, and animated graphics show how some structures were built or destroyed. The number of visitors has doubled since the viewer was installed in July 2006, says Isabel Almeida, who manages the castle.”
(excerpt, read the full article)

Time Magazine’s “Best Inventions of the Year” feature has some really interesting applications / gadgets:

Xerox’s self-erasing paper, on the Environment section, seems to go on a less ambitious direction than our own interactive paper R&D, but nonetheless it could be a very interesting application (I think my desk would be really appreciative if I could reuse the same paper over and over).

pink is the new white?

Very interesting things also on the Fashion inventions section (not talking about the models, erm), such as the Philips SKIN Dresses that we already know of, but are still quite impressive and good-loking (again, not talking about the models) while reflecting the user’s mood

‘Today I woke up feeling very bubbly’

or this augmented reality type of interactive mirror developed by IconNicholson (try to say it fast) for Bloomingdale’s store

from now on cross-dressing will never be as easy

Apparently there are also very important developments in the field of fiber-optics cables, and I’m just including it here because I really like the picture they use to illustrate it.

it looks like someone had his morning fiber

And in case you are wondering, the iPhone - yes, yes - grabbed both the Invention of the Year and the Gadget awards. Jump here for the full article.