The latest video from the Black Eyed Peas, entitled “The Time (Dirty Bit)”, shows some cool Mobile Augmented Reality, seemingly happening on the new BlackBerry PlayBook – RIM’s answer to the iPad.

Checkout the video, from around 2:13 onwards:

Of course, in the video, all of the AR is all applied post production – it’s not real! However it does hint that the PlayBook will have some kind of AR feature built in, or at least that the device will be AR capable.

Unless you are Will.I.Am you’ll need to wait until March 2011 to get your hands on a PlayBook, so I guess we’ll have to wait until then to see what it’s really capable of.

In the meantime, in case any of the Black Eyed Peas are reading this, why settle for post-production video tricks when you can have the real thing right now?! What is in the video is totally possible on existing Android tablets using Total Immersion’s powerful D’Fusion system. So if you’re out there, why not give us a call?

Augmented Reality is great for helping people get a feel for a product without actually getting their hands on it. We’ve all seen some great examples, where you hold a marker in your hands and up pops a 3D rendering of the product. But what happens when the product in question is several hundred metres tall?

This didn’t stop André Fogaça from Rossi construction in Brazil, who figured that if a small printed marker can be used to show a small 3D model then he’d simply scale up the marker to show a much larger model. In this case the the ‘Fibrasa Connection’ development – a huge tower block!

So this is just what he did, printing an enormous marker (over 10 metres square) and placing it on the site where his company was due to build the tower. He then hired a helicopter to fly round the site, and used his web-cam equipped notebook to run the AR software. Great thinking André!

Bruno Uzzan, CEO and Co-Founder of Total Immersion, made this important announcement during his keynote presentation, at AR Immersion 2010 in Los Angeles this week.

The collaboration between Adobe and Total Immersion will foster optimization of Total Immersion’s D’Fusion software platform for developers and companies using the Adobe® Flash® Platform, of which there are many (over three million at last count).

Flash has an enormous user-base, with over 98% of internet-connected PCs worldwide having the Flash player installed. This alliance will considerably accelerate the market penetration of augmented reality applications, and will take Flash-based AR well beyond the confines of the current black and white marker-based systems.

Under the collaborative relationship, Total Immersion and Adobe will work together to help ensure the Flash Platform is enhanced for the development of professional AR experiences, providing seamless playback on any platform that supports the Adobe Flash Platform runtimes.  Total Immersion also plans to leverage the new ‘molehill’ Flash Player and Adobe AIR 3D APIs when they are made available in future releases of the runtimes.

AR Immersion 2010 Keynote: Special Guest Session with Adobe - Part 1

AR Immersion 2010 Keynote: Special Guest Session with Adobe - Part 2

If you’d like us to develop a Flash-based AR solution for you, we’re ready and waiting, so feel free to get in touch today!

Rock'em Sock'em Robots is a two-player boxing game that was first manufactured by the Marx toy company in 1964. It features two robots that fight each other, using simple mechanical manipulation to allow the players to control their robot. The game is won when one of the opponents loses their head - the robot that is, not the player!

A number of different versions have been produced since then, and the game has sold in the hundreds of thousands, becoming something of a minor pop-culture phenomenon.

In 2000, a remake of the classic version was developed by Mattel, at approximately half the size of the original model. You can still buy this (at the time of writing) from Mattel's ecommerce shop.

Now Mattel are enabling a whole new generation to experience the Rock'em Sock'em Robots game, but this time via Augmented Reality on an Android SmartPhone!

Augmented Reality implementations on SmartPhones have actually been around for a while, but have tended to be somewhat basic graphics-wise, using floating tags to indicate points of interest. There have been examples using 3D graphics, but the limited processing power and display capabilities of mobile devices has made for a less than ideal experience... until now that is.

Mattel's AR Rock'em Sock'em Robots game features graphics that are more akin to what you would expect from a desktop Augmented Reality experience, and it enables a high degree of user interaction by using two phones to control the action - one for each player.

The game is the first incarnation of a sophisticated AR development system by chipset manufacturers Qualcomm, running on an Android 2.1 handset with a Snapdragon processor. This game has essentially been created to demonstrate the potential of this system, however it is not available yet commercially, sadly.

We will however start to see more engaging and graphically rich mobile Augmented Reality experiences like this start to appear over the coming months, as SmartPhone hardware and software continues to improve - so watch this space!

Eye is second only to brain as the most complex organ in the human body, and its ability to view millions of colours in an intricate mechanism infinitely more complex than a modern-day camera bears testament to nature’s marvel. However, nature’s limits are now being tested in research work carried out by Prof. Babak Parviz of University of Washington. Prof. Parviz claims to have made use of augmented reality in exclusively manufactured contact lenses to produce a superimposed field of vision that could signal an era where the futuristic Cyborg eye of Terminator movies fame will cease to be a fantasy.

Image: Raygun Studio

Prof. Babak Parviz’s revelation published in Spectrum IEEE, in an article authored by the professor himself, discusses how augmented reality and specially built contact lenses on flexible and transparent polymer with miniscule circuits could alter our day-to-day lives. Although imminent use of this is for enhanced vision, he feels that non-intrusive tracking of wearers' bio-markers and health indicators such as blood sugar level could open up a huge future market.

According to Prof. Parviz, his students have already created a lens with a RF powered single LED, integrated in polymer-based contact lenses carrying miniature circuits and antennae. As further progress is made, hundreds of LEDs would be added, enabling images to be seen in front of the eye, a hallmark of augmented reality technology. He feels that in all probability a separate mobile device will be used to transmit the information required for forming images to the lens’s control circuit, in charge of the optoelectronics in the lens.

Prof. Parviz also confirms that his students were successful in building numerous basic sensors that are capable of recognizing a molecule’s concentration and once these sensors are built into the lenses, they allow wireless transmission of data pertaining to the molecule. He explains this with the example of diabetic patients who could monitor their blood sugar level without the need to prick, and with added wireless capability, allow the lens to transmit data wirelessly to medical staff. This would eliminate the need for a traditional lab solution and in the process, lessen the chance of administrative errors.

The work is also not without some mind-boggling technical challenges and Prof. Parviz speaks of three fundamental issues. Firstly the incompatibility of the majority of lens parts and subsystems with each other and lens polymer, solved by creating all devices from scratch. Secondly, the arduous task of miniaturising and integrating key components of the lens into a tiny 1.5 square cms of a flexible polymer, which he feels is yet to be solved satisfactorily. The final challenge concerns the safety of the eye, which he illustrates by pointing to the use of toxic aluminium gallium arsenide in the manufacture of red LEDs, which needs to be encapsulated in a biocompatible material to alleviate the issue.

What is fascinating about this remarkable work is that it opens up a whole new frontier and the Prof. Parviz confidently predicts even more startling uses that include speech translation into real time captions, and visual cues from a navigation system. Prof. Parviz’s vision of the future where the fusion of highly sophisticated, display-capable contact lenses, augmented reality technology and the power of the internet seem an exciting prospect and bring a large portfolio of remarkable uses. Add to that its ability to be life-saving and we have a much needed vision for the future indeed.