Our YVision team has been pretty busy these last few months replacing some of the engines to make sure YVision is executable on as many platforms as possible. The work’s paid off! This latest release brings better support for Silverlight 5 and mobile devices in the near future.

Check out the features for the latest release:

• Support for Silverlight 5 final (RTW) - Now you can run your 3D interactive applications in the browser. Extensive work has been done to make sure you app compiles for .NET 4.0 and Silverlight 5 with minimal code changes. Check out a couple of demos on our cases page.
• SLARToolKit on .NET 4.0 - Now you can take advantage of the popular augmented-reality engine on other platforms other than Silverlight. SLARToolKit is now included in the SDK, you don’t need a separate download. Be sure to check the SLARToolKit license to make sure it fits your needs.
• Steering behaviors - These allow you to apply behaviors (defined by Craig Reynolds) like seek, flee, pursue, evade, wander, arrival, obstacle avoidance, containment, wall following, path following and flow field following to your objects. These can be combined in behavior trees to achieve complex behaviors like flocking, queuing and many more.
• Settings and visualizers - You can now easily expose settings to users so that they can customize/calibrate the application.
• New project templates, item templates and code snippets - In our continuous effort to simplify your work, we added many more templates.  The samples are provided as templates so that you can mess around with them as much as possible. All the samples work on Silverlight and Windows.
• Multiple bug fixes - The framework has proven to be very robust but not without a few issues. If you find any new issue, please report it to us.

This release is only for Windows but we hope to have the Mac OS X release soon. We are working on optimizing the ‘build process’ so we can have simultaneous and more frequent releases in the future.

Go to our download page to get this latest version. We hope you have as much fun trying it out as we did developing it!

Audience Entertainment (AE) ̶  co-owned by YDreams  ̶  and NCM Media Networks are bringing audiences’ favorite brands to life on the big screen in select movie theaters across the U.S. this holiday season.

AE and NCM Media Networks worked together with a top travel industry brand to create a new interactive cinema audience game. The game, powered by a proprietary platform that enhances human-computer interactions and create engaging and robust applications, will be used for the first time in a national cinema ad campaign across the United States.

In the game, moviegoers are able to join a classic cartoon character in a 90-second interactive, big screen version of a wild water ride from the comfort of their movie theater seats. By moving their arms and acting together as a group, the audience creates a virtual “human joystick” to control the videogame action onscreen – zipping down the slide and retrieving objects along the way. The score will be posted at the end of the game, but no matter what the tally, the audience always wins by being among the first in the U.S. to experience the future of cinema advertising.

The new AudienceGame is being presented exclusively during NCM’s FirstLook pre-feature program in select movie theaters in major markets including Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Denver, Houston, Knoxville, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, New York, Philadelphia, San Francisco and Washing-ton, DC.

This exciting new campaign features Audience Entertainment Group’s first-ever use of the combi-nation of live video and animated overlays in an AudienceGame.

To view the game, CLICK HERE.

A great example of augmented reality for young kids. It’s an augmented book, developed by YDreams’ R&D group, where kids can take control of the story. The app is totally powered by YVision:

Antão Almada, YDreams’ Strategic Software Development Director, will be hosting a workshop dubbed “YVision, an Interactive application for Learning” at the Creative Learning Conference at Centro Congressos de Lisboa on Monday, October 26th, 2011.
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Antão presently heads the company’s YVision team that has been working on the development of a platform for applications based on Natural User Interfaces (NUI) and Augmented Reality (AR).

For more information go to: http://www.creativelearning-conference.com/2011/

YVision, YDreams’ Natural User Interfaces (NUI) division, has just announced that its Beta version now supports development on Mac OS X.

For more info and to give it a try, go to: http://www.yvision.com/2011/09/15/yvision-development-now-also-supported-on-mac-os-x/

Sport Club Recife, a football team in North-eastern Brazil, recently posted the video below showing the club using YVision’s free Beta version of its software development kit (SDK) to create a Boxfall application featuring 3D Augmented Reality cubes customized with the team’s logo!

Yvision, a YDreams’ spinout, is dedicated to the research and production of software development kits. To find out more about them, or download their SDK, visit their website at http://www.yvision.com.

Parent-company YDreams now counts three spinouts and one joint venture

The YDreams Group is proud to announce that its members are growing in number. A joint-venture with a North American partner brought us Audience Entertainment in December 2008; Ynvisible, dedicated to developing and producing electrochromic displays was officially launched in early 2010, and listed on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange in February 2011.

2011 ushered in two more spinout companies - Yvision, developer and producer of software development kits, and more recently YDRobotics, which will specialize in robotics and mechatronics fields.

More information about each one HERE!

Today, YDreams’ Natural User Interfaces (NUI) division is officially releasing the free Beta version of its YVision software development kit (SDK), via its dedicated website at http://www.yvision.com.

YVision is the result of ten years of research and development in human-computer interaction. Created by the company division that focuses solely on NUI design and software architecture, this framework is behind many of YDreams’ interactive solutions and has been deployed in thousands of engaging and robust NUI applications.

According to Ivan Franco, YDreams’ Director of R&D, “Our framework is the missing link between traditional Game Engines and Natural User Interfaces. It promotes creativity and expressivity, by offloading the complex interoperability of the multiple technologies, which are indispensable to deliver state-of-the-art interactive products.”

YVision is a component-based framework that allows programmers to develop complex systems based on pre-built modules, which are operated by behavior trees. The .NET – based framework assures faster development, removes the need for complex resource handling and offers users multi-platform deployment for desktops, mobiles and consoles.

The SDK features a full abstraction layer for real-time 3D rendering and was also designed to support the upcoming Microsoft Silverlight 5, enabling users to build the next full 3D experience for the web browser. In addition, YVision offers state-of-the-art physics and computer vision. The creation of NUI applications also depends heavily on sensor acquisition and processing, so YVision is ready to process complex sensor data and manage several kinds of input devices.

“The current beta release is for PCs only. Because we want to offer the best possible experience, extensive testing is being carried out for the Mac and Silverlight platforms, and mobile platforms will soon follow”, explains Mr. Franco,“Stay tuned, because we intend to follow the ‘release often’ motto”.

The SDK, along with detailed information and instructions, is available for download via the following URL: http://www.yvision.com. We hope you will enjoy it and look forward to hearing your feedback!

YVision, our proprietary tech platform, now runs on all major browsers! Brief video below shows Beta version with real-time, 3D interaction, being tested:

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!

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.

In case you’re wondering what you can accomplish using YVision take a look at some the stuff we’ve put together over the past years: interactive projections, digital performances, interactive installations, interactive digital signage, augmented reality, robotics, 3D interaction and much more. The imagination really is the limit, so enjoy!

Just got back from the U.S. after presenting the paper “YVision: A General Purpose Software Composition Framework” at the HCII2009 conference.

Many of natural user interfaces (NUI) use cameras to detect the presence of people, objects, markers, etc. This type of applications are very complex as it may include many computer science subjects like, computer vision, real-time 3D graphics, real-time physics simulation, artificial inteligence and multi-threading.

There are many libraries like OpenCV, OGRE and ODE, that resolve some of these problems but, how can we integrate all them into an easy to develop and easy to customize environment.

YVision is a platform developed by YDreams’ R&D group (YLabs) and used by YDreams’ production for the last 3 years. Many dozens of applications for our customers have been developed on it and we recently released version 3.0.

It is fully developed in C# and fully integrated into Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 (project and item templates, code snippets, IntelliSense, reference documentation) making it very productive for the developers.

Although the platform was primarily developed for NUI applications, it was kept open enough to be used on many other scenarios. We are currently using it to simulate and control robots. This is why we call it “general purpose”.

HCII2009 is a conference dedicated to several aspects of human-computer interaction. The paper was reviewed, accepted for the Rapid User Interface Prototyping (RUIP) session and published on “Human-Computer Interaction. New Trends”.

The presentation slides can be found at SlideShare.

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.

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.