Ben and Jerry’s Moo Vision Markerless Augmented Reality for iPhone

by patrick on July 19, 2010

Ben and Jerry's "Moo Vision" Augmented Reality for iPhone.

Chunk Generosity Diorama revealed with Moo Vision

Ben & Jerry’s “Moo Vision” has now been available for two weeks (via iTunes), and its been great to see the reaction.  Here are some quotes, movie poster style:

“a must try for ice cream fans” - Augmented Planet

“Ben & Jerry’s iPhone App Gets Even More Psychedelic with Augmented Reality” – Mashable

“Ben & Jerry’s is now the first major brand to sport natural feature tracking on the iPhone” – ReadWriteWeb

I was thrilled to be involved in developing the first 3rd-party iPhone app to use matio’s Unifeye Mobile SDK, and working with Circ.us, Edelman, and metaio was fantastic.  But even better is knowing that we’ve only scratched the surface of what’s possible, and I can’t wait to see what else comes along and to get involved in making it happen.

The project had some interesting challenges.  The Unifeye SDK performs natural feature tracking (NFT), which means that it is able to track 2D images that aren’t limited to black & white blocky markers.  In the ideal case when using NFT, you’ll have control over the target image to be recognized and tracked, so that you can optimize the image for track-ability by the vision system.  For this app, the target images were Ben & Jerry’s pint lids, so we very well couldn’t ask them to reprint them!  Also, pint lids are circular and AR libraries generally tend to deal with rectangular images. Therefore, the tracking configuration went through several iterations to get a result that tracked well under various lighting conditions and camera angles. Major kudos to Stefan Misslinger at metaio and his engineering team in Germany for their fantastic support and tweaks to the SDK.

Here’s a video of the app in action (with editing by the multi-talented Paul Jannicola):

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Free DIY Lightweight Portable Adjustable iPad Stand

by patrick on July 16, 2010

DVD Case iPad Stand with USB cord attached.

DVD Case iPad Stand with USB cord attached.

I’ve been on the look out for an iPad stand that I can throw in my laptop bag.  I’ve come across various DIY options, but all of them seemed either way too much work or not portable.  The .69 business card holder was the frontrunner, but I don’t have an Office Depot nearby, and also didn’t like the fact that it wasn’t something that would fold flat. Inspired by this Gizmodo post, I came up with a solution that you can create in a couple minutes.  All you need is a standard single DVD case, and a couple of binder clips, and you’ve got yourself a foldable, portable, flat, lightweight, adjustable, iPad case for $0:

  1. Empty the case
  2. Fold it back to the angle you prefer
  3. Fold the outside clear plastic around the side where the DVD should go, and use the binder clips to secure it.
  4. Insert your iPad into the DVD case interior clips

It folds in half for a quick stash in your bag, but is pretty rough around the edges.  For a cleaner fold:

  1. DVD Case iPad Stand folded up.

    DVD Case iPad Stand folded up.

    Remove the binder clips

  2. Re-clip them to the side of the DVD case opposite where the DVD would normally go
  3. Close the case

It works in both portrait and landscape orientations, and even accommodates the data cable if you bend the clips forward a bit to give it clearance.

DVD Case iPad Stand in landscape mode

DVD Case iPad Stand in landscape mode.

It might not take win any beauty contests or take the edge off the $30/month you’re shelling out for the 3G data plan, but just might give you a warm fuzzy feeling that you did the green thing by finding a use for your old stuff.

I’d love to hear if anyone tries this out.  Have any improvement suggestions?

DVD Case iPad Stand from the back

DVD Case iPad Stand from the back.

DVD Case iPad Stand at a steep angle

DVD Case iPad Stand at a steep angle.

DVD Case iPad Stand at a shallow angle

DVD Case iPad Stand at a shallow angle.

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Patched Reality FLAR Framework v0.1 release

June 1, 2010

Today I’m announcing the first public availability of an application framework I’ve been developing that complements FLARToolkit and FLARManager, and makes it possible to rapidly produce Flash augmented reality applications. This past year I spent many many hours with FLARToolkit and  Eric Socolofsky’s excellent FLARManager.  FLARManager makes the overall FLARToolkit configuration much simpler, especially if you want to mirror the [...]

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Parrot unveils AR.Drone iPhone-controlled quadricopter

January 7, 2010

Okay.  Here is something I didn’t predict would come out in 2010 – a carbon fiber quadricopter AR input device and gaming platform for the iPhone.  Why wait for Apple to open up their camera API, when you can slap one onto a self-stabilizing 4-propeller geeks’ dream toy?  The clever folks at Parrot and int13 [...]

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Augmented Reality in 2010

December 15, 2009

My general outlook for next year is that more focus will be paid to utility and entertainment uses of AR, and less focus will be paid to AR as marketing gimmick. Augmented Reality for home shopping will explode. See-through eyewear will still be out of reach of the average consumer. Augmented reality will raise consumer consciousness. Smartphones will ship with two video cameras. Games, games, and more games.

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Five Lives of Criss Angel Augmented Reality Experience Launched

August 11, 2009

This was a fun project to put together. It’s somewhat unique in the increasingly crowded field of FLARToolkit-based marketing applications out there, as it makes use of the pan, tilt, and roll of the marker as inputs to a game (good old SOH-CAH-TOA came in handy for calculating that part).  For this project, I decided to [...]

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US Postal Service makes practical use of augmented reality

May 31, 2009

This is one of the best uses of FLARToolkit that I have seen to-date. I’m glad to see people making use of AR to solve actual problems, and not solely for the wow factor. You can’t get much more un-wow than a USPS priority mail box, but a simple app like this could help make [...]

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SAP EcoHub augmented reality project launched

May 11, 2009

I just finished developing a new augmented reality experience for SAP, to promote the SAP EcoHub during the Sapphire 09 conference in Orlando, FL this week.  The project was a collaboration between myself, Ori Inbar of Games Alfresco, and Seventh, Inc.  I programmed it, Ori produced it, and Seventh, Inc created the 3D artwork. The [...]

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Added support for multiple animation clips in Collada models in Papervision3D

April 30, 2009

On my current FLARToolkit project (release soon!), I needed the ability to trigger more than one animation for a Collada file.  No problem, I figured, I’ll just use the convenient DAE.play(clip:String) method.  Unfortunately, I discovered that the implementation of that method didn’t make use of the “optional” clip name: /** * Plays the animation. * [...]

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