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:
It’s not easy to patent in Portugal if the subject matter is not Chemistry or Mechanics.
YDreams’ first effort to get a patent started in 2005. We submitted a text with ‘claims’ that basically described augmented reality. Such claims were undisturbed until an International Search Report quoted the Azuma paper ‘A Survey of Augmented Reality’ as a direct prior art. We realized that our claim had to be corrected.
The Virtual SightSeeing ® device was then described in more detail, and 2007 saw YDreams get their first patent granted. In the wake lay many hours of programming, design, quality control, and sheer will. Paramount to any patent effort is time. Lots of it. That seminal patent still awaits approval in some countries, and YDreams proceeded to file application after application, with some decisions taking a bit longer than we had hoped.
With the disparity in legal systems, the long-standing struggles about software patents, and more recently business method patents, what policy is a small company with a big heart to take in regard to IP?
When researching or trying to convince oneself that something really is new and original, thoughts are sometimes mingled with a vague ancestral image that the logic has been done before and one is just applying it to new ends, just as answers to some questions are found in old books holding Latin mottos like est modus in rebus.
In the very near feature we’ll have a new version of the Virtual Sightseeing Scenic Viewer, our Augmented Reality landscape exploration device. Here’s a teaser, courtesy of Pedro Cardoso, our Art Director:
