reality

There's no need to mentally undress people when you have an app that can do it for you. Moosejaw decided to take outdoor clothing in a Victoria's Secret direction with the Moosejaw X-Ray App for iPhone, iPad, and Android.

The free app harnesses the power of augmented reality to strip the puffy jackets and pants off of its models. Fire up the app, hold it up to a model in the catalog, and get a view of the unmentionables beneath.… Read more

Here's an interesting iPad-equipped, augmented-reality twist on adbusting and culture jamming.

Responding to my recent post about a mural "restored" using a giant QR code, CNET reader victoria_ro pointed to an ongoing project by the New York-based Public Ad Campaign and its Left Coast compatriot The Heavy Projects.

The project, which surfaced in New York's Times Square earlier this year, is dubbed the Augmented Reality Advertising Takeover, or AR | AD, and it "uses augmented reality to transform, filter, and democratize the messaging in public space"--to quote the intro to a video that documents the effort (you'll find the film embedded below).

A clutch of artists create works that appear when viewers toting iPads or other smart mobile devices train their gadgets on given ads. A setup using Junaio's augmented-reality technology, which can recognize images, spies a particular ad and serves up the appropriate art piece.… Read more

It seems a mural sponsored by the city of Vancouver, British Columbia, as a deterrent to graffiti, wound up attracting a little instead. But someone came up with an interesting temporary fix for the defacement.

A tipster named Jason informed street-art site Wooster Collective that a giant QR code had been placed over the offending, spray-painted tag.

And when passersby scan the code with their smartphones, they're served up an image of the original, undamaged mural, along with information about its origins.

That's a nice idea. But in describing the fix as "temporary" a few paragraphs … Read more

A remote-controlled robot may stop satellites in space from running on empty.

As part of a NASA project, researchers at John Hopkins University have modified a robotics console normally used in surgery so it could be used to operate a filling station in space. By refueling aging satellites, their owners can get more useful life out of their expensive hardware. If it works, satellites can be repaired or refueled without having to send out human repair crews.

John Hopkins was tapped to address the problem of operating the fuel tanker in space from Earth because of its experience in robotically-enhanced … Read more

Though you might be obsessing over the next MacBook Air or the latest and greatest Android smartphone, your future laptop or mobile device might already be lying around your house.

Researchers at the Ishikawa Oku Laboratory at the University of Tokyo have come up with a concept called "invoked computing" that turns everyday objects into computer interfaces and communication devices using a ubiquitous augmented-reality system.

The concept is based on the idea that technology should learn our behavior and respond to us, instead of the other way around. As such, with invoked computing, one would just need to mimic a certain task and the computer should recognize the gesture and turn any object into a usable electronic device. … Read more

Amazon subsidiary A9 has just launched the Flow iPhone app. It's yet another visual shopping aid: you point it at a product, and it looks it up and gives you a price and an ordering link.

The difference is that Flow is more real-time and more fun to use than other apps, including the Amazon app and eBay's RedLaser. Just point it at a boxed item and it will recognize it and pop up a "buy" link. If you do nothing, the link will just fade into your log of scanned items. Keep pointing your phone at products, and it just keeps collecting links. It's like the Furni scene in "Fight Club" come to life. … Read more

Imagine sweeping your phone around a room and seeing a plethora of information about the pictures, music, and video around you. The Digimarc Discover app lets your phone read QR codes printed on products, identify tunes playing nearby, buy tickets when movies are advertised on a TV playing near you, and follow watermark links hidden in articles and product packaging.

Digital watermark purveyor Digimarc demoed the technology this spring and has now made the free app for iOS and Android available for download. The app falls somewhere between simple bar code readers and augmented-reality apps that recognize real-world objects and link information to them.

Digimarc Discover is the Swiss Army knife of real-world identification. It figures out the most appropriate identifying technologies for a given situation--QR code, watermark, audio and/or video--depending on where you are and how you've used it in the past.… Read more

Augmented reality in smartphones is just getting started.

If you have a smartphone or Nintendo 3DS, you've probably played with some form of augmented reality, which superimposes graphics, words and other useful information over real-life images.

Yelp, for instance, offers its Monocle feature, allowing you to see local listings superimposed over the image captured by the phone's camera. It uses the compass and gyroscope to locate the specific listings, which move in and out of view depending on where you hold the device. The augmented browser Layar came to prominence by accomplishing the same feat on Android smartphones. … Read more

I've been waiting half my life for the phrase "in your face!" to finally die. Now that it seems to be fading, I may have to contend with the rise of "On your face," as in "I'm gonna kick your ass, on your face!"

It's all thanks to a new technology that allows game players to actually fight their digital battles on their own faces. The iOS game Skinvaders uses an augmented-reality (AR) platform to take advantage of the devices' front-facing cameras and transform players' faces into the game terrain on which alien invaders must be defeated to save the world, or your face, or whatever... … Read more