Google’s coming out with Froyo (Android 2.2) soon and, guess what? I’m more excited about it than I thought I’d be. Features look good, esp. the wifi hotspot-ability, among others. I also love the fact that Google Voice is now open to the public (get yo GV digits now!). One more thing: Check out the Droid X. By July it will be running Froyo and Flash 10.1.
Of course, the timing is impeccable with iPhone iOS 4.
We live in interesting times. Let’s see how this froes.
Augmented Reality Heads-Up Display View
My question to you is, do you believe in Augmented Reality?
In many ways, the notion of augmented reality is similar to 3D in a sense that expectations have been set high, but it hasn’t quite delivered. We expected HUD in cars that help us with directions and more; we expected augmented reality glasses that help us with what we are seeing — and we expected this to happen a decade ago. Hm…
Recently, there’s been a lot of talk about iPhone 3.1 that will enable real-time overlays for applications like augmented reality stuff. Definitely looking forward to what will happen there, and what type of innovations will be pushed from this community.
Personally, I think there’s a lot more innovation in technology and UI/UX for AR to succeed. Image recognition algorithms are not robust enough for general scenes (like in our every-day lives), but when supplemented with GPS, compass, accelerometers, and other sensors just might work and be useful.
What do you think?
One way to get more resolution or field of view is to create a panorama — take more photos and put them together. My previous two posts have been about this, and am following up with a few more examples of Arc de Triomphe in Paris.
As I’ve mentioned before, I used AutoStitch on my iPhone 3G S. Much of the panoramas were an experimentation of adding some time and positional elements, which resulted in pretty cool stitched photos.
To get what I call the time element, I stayed in the same place a few minutes waiting for dynamic elements of the scene to change — e.g. cars, people, clouds. By doing this, things that are static remain more solid and things that move have a ghost-like quality to them.
To get what I call the positional elements, I tried to focus on a feature as I walked along a path. In these examples, I focused on the Arc while moving towards it. This tends to create an impressionist-painting-like effect.
I wanted an app on the iPhone that stitched mosaics/panoramas on the iPhone without having to off-load anything. So, I searched the App store for “panoramas” and found a bunch, and tested them. I found three apps that I liked:
My clear favorite was AutoStitch, since it seemed to be the easiest to use. All I had to do was to select a bunch of photos that I took for a panorama, throw them in a “bucket,” and then click “stitch.” After crunching away, it created some pretty awesome stitched mosaics. All photos that you see posted here are stitched using AutoStich. Definitely try it out.
