Engadgets unveils a new, fancy e-book reader equipped with a color OLED display, wireless connectivity and a 5-days lasting battery manufactured by Asus.

According to the popular websites, the e-book reader will sport a 6″ display and

will play back Flash video, includes WiFi and 3G, and supposedly can last for 122 hours on one charge [...] It’s supposed to be released by the end of the year.

Egadgets reports that the Asus DR-570 has more, appealing features which include storage, applications, bundled services, and multimedia capabilities:

We now know that in addition to WiFi, 3G, and 122-hour real world battery life, we can expect lightning quick 0.03 second page turns (that’s about 23 times faster than the Kindle and its peers as you’d expect from a non E Ink display), 124 x 170 x 8.8-mm / 200-g footprint, 4GB of onboard storage with SDHC expansion, 512MB of SDRAM, and 1,530mAh battery. It also brings a built-in RSS reader, audio/video/Flash player, text to speech engine (presumably the Svox like the DR-950), and built-in web browser when it hits before the end of the year. There’s also a hint of online video streaming support via Amazon video on demand, 3D gaming and navigation (picture Blio page turning emulation), “One stop shopping for books, video, music,” and explicit support for ePub, PDF, txt, MP3, MP4, and AVI content formats.

Kindle and simlar e-book readers brought by Sony, Samsung and other CE giants have already introduced a new and strong paradigm shift in content consumption and will be capable to dramatically affect the publishing (newspapers, books) industry and ecosystems.

A color display and serious hardware improvements can really change users’ attitudes and beahviours not only in reading books and documents but also in consuming multimedia files such as movies, audio tracks and full color multimedia news. Plus, we expect that an increasing number of people, specially frequent travellers, executives and heavy readers, will benefit from a lightweight, connected multimedia device which can show news, stories, RSS feeds, pictures, and videos without draining the battery in one hour. On top of the hardware features and the usage considerations, there are some more questions that we should answer in the next weeks: which impact will the color e-book reader have on the media industry? Will they be a niche gadget or replace full color magazines in news stands? Are e-book readers the next generation of netbooks and multimedia internet connected devices?

We started dealing with augmented reality applications for mobile devices about one year ago and most of them have been released during the first half of 2009. Nevertheless, in the last few months, we didn’t find any new or disruptive application or concept. It sounds like the developers are still waiting the audinece to widespreadly adopt AR apps in their everyday digital life.

Wired, which helped us a lot to find out the latest cutting edge gadget, service or story, has recently published a short and clear ranking of AR applications with a short description. As we could expect, Yelp wins the first place with its Monocole; but what sounds weird to us is that Layar, the powerful AR platform, is almost in the bottoms of the ranking.

Anyway, this classification can be useful to better understand which are the mainstream AR apps and which platforms they are available for.

Augmented reality technology and services are reaching their hype and popularity in web search, according to TechCrunch. Reportedly, the search hit for keyword Augmented Reality ha been constantly growing in the last months, while searches on another well known related buzzword (Virtual Reality) are sinking.

Probably Second Life was the last chance for Virtual reality to regain his popularity. But, as far as we know, SL population has left that village, period.

The chart below, published by TechCrunch, effectively shows the las trends in websearch in terms of search volume.

Truth be said, TechCrunch also wrote on of the most comprehensive definition of AR:

These apps show the world around you as seen through your phone’s camera, but in addition to functioning as a viewfinder, your screen also functions as a regular computer screen. With help from the GPS and on-board compass, it can place information or graphics on top of buildings or objects seen through the viewfinder.

Even though the web is crowded with posts, reviews, stories, and comments about Augmented Reality, actually there’re few new applications, services or announcements dealing with AR. During the last Las vegas based Consumer Electronic Show (January 7-10, 2010) only a couple AR-relaed things have been shown to the audience.

One is the flying drone plus iPhone application carried out by Parrot (Blutooth devices and car stereo system, yes). It’s a simulation game application, but it’s cool and, according to the reports, did crwods.

The second one is a pair of visors manufactured by Vuzix, wearable computer equipped glasses which are supposed to enable people to look into the world, bringing mixed and augmented reality content to life.

We came across with visors for portable video player years ago, and honestly it wasn’t a big hit.

Christmas time is probably the most important period of the year for Hollywood majors to deliver and promote theri last movies. 2009 will be probably remebered as the yera of 3D return in theatres, with several cartoons and movies “filmed” with 3D effects.

Despite my long time skepticism, 3D is becoming popular not only in large, multiplex theatres or in family entertainment centres, but also in small, independent cinemas. As a result, the 3D audience is rapidly increasing.

I found a detaild articled published by Wired, which explains how 3D works and also how much it costs. It’s a valuable story because Wired visited olby Laboratories which are probably hemost innovative tehnology providers in the movie industry.

Google is entering the world of augmented reality by taking the advantage of its numerous and powerful assets which, actually, required important investments in terms of data and information – indeed Google can rely on one of the largest database of pictures, videos, maps, views and metadata ever.

Basically, the new beta application announced and later launched by Google is an exciting example of visual search which can be performed by browsing the reality through the a cameraphone’s display. By the way, the device is now Android based but other mobile platforms will be available in the future, thus a roadmap has not been disclosed yet. Here you can read (among the other experiments) Google Goggle official announcement.

There have been visual search applications like Nokia Point&Find, Kooaba, which you can find information of movie posters and books directly shooting picture with mobile phone. And also augmented apps for discovering restaurants that you are looking for. Now google has entered this field with their aggregated technologies. It’s called ‘Google Goggles’, simply more powerful and practically reachable for the Android mobile users.

In this page, readers can learn the basics of Google Goggle (playing with words can be a serious game, sometimes): according to Google Mobile Blog, the application installed on a smartphone equipped with Android 1.6 

identifies landmarks, works of art, and products (among other things), and in all cases its ability to “see further” is rooted in powerful computing, pervasive connectivity, and the cloud:

• We first send the user’s image to Google’s datacenters
• We then create signatures of objects in the image using computer vision algorithms
• We then compare signatures against all other known items in our image recognition databases; and
• We then figure out how many matches exist; and
• We then return one or more search results, based on available meta data and ranking signals; and
• We do all of this in just a few seconds

Apart from the technical details, the most impressive aspect of Google’s approach to Augmented Reality is that Google actually owns or manages most of the parts that the ecosystem is made of (maps, images, Streetview, users’ profile, advertisment tools, web analytics…); plus, Google Android is becoming more and more popular in mobile smartphones, which can be considered as the gateway to access the most innovative and personalized (and lucrative, why not) services ever.

So far, Mountain View giant states that the new application can provide the following functionalities: Recognize Bookcovers, Landmarks, Wine labels, Business Card, and Logos by taking picture. While 2d object recognition is not particlarly new to us (we have already written about Amazon, SnapTell and Barnes&Noble amazing apps), the server-side performed landmark recognition is pretty good and promising: Google owns and manages (again) bunch of information about places and scenes which can be watched through a cameraphone equipped with GPS and internet connection.

We can expect that one of the next steps in Google’s AR services may be realted to the ability of showing advertisments associated to places, streets, display windows, buildings… How many scenarios ad service concpets can we imagine after counting all the pieces of Google Ecosystems? Many, according my educated guess. And it’s so exciting. Google has spent so many resouces to turn the reality into bits. It’s not a technological issue (anymore): from now on, it’s a matter of designing service concepts, drawing use cases and conceiving commercial and strategical deals between the ecosystem’s players. In a few words, it’s a matter of monetizing digtalized information.

Layar is a pioneer in Augmented Reality technology and applications for smartphone. Their product is quite popular and often mentioned as an example of successful and innovative app for latest generation smartphone. Additionally, as stated in a recent post published on their official blog, Layar is also becoming famous as a powerful platform for developers who have the ability to create interactive and personalized 3dimensional environments and applications and to superimpose content and information to the reality framed by a camera equipped smartphone.

This post is quite interesting because it shares with the readers some of the most effective examples developed with Layar platform. For instance, an architecture application with a 3D model enables the visitor to walk around the building and look inside – as if it was already there.
Layer developed by the Netherlands Architecture Institute (NAi) and in cooperation with IN10

An AR platform can also help advertisers and content providers to deliver entertaining content and commercials as an overlay: while users browse the environment surrounding them, an advanced, fancy evolution of web based pop ups and banner could be displayed on the screen. The picture below is an example developed by Layar’s partner Winvolve.  

The next challenge will be undesratnd how to address the users with the content and the messages (both information and advertising) that they expect or like according to their preferences and profiles. Smart phones, which are considered more personal thatn a laptop, and social networks , which carry a lot of information related to their members, can help advertisers and content providers to create and deliver higly customized content and messages; Augmented Reality can be the effective presentation layer to superimpose and deliver these kinds of content.

The increasing popularity of Augmented Reality apps for smart phone (which means, iPhone and Android: apps for Windows Mobile are still to come) is under the radar of our blog since a (quite) long time and, indeed, we have found that most of the apps available for download are focused on a small number of application fields.

According to a classification developed by Gary Hayes, augmented reality applications can be catalogued in 16 different business (we’d rather write service) models. The chart below is useful to understand which apps are more popular and profitable (or, whith a higher commercial value).

We believe that our of these 16 service models, we can pick up four or five main models which could be applied or involved in an AR service concept which a strong relationship with telecommunication and social network capabilities:

• Location layer
• Enhanced classified
• Personalized shopping  
• Recognition and Targeting
• Blended Brand

These models carry important features which can help us designing or conceiving an augmented reality driven application or a service which can involve different players in the ecosystems, with particular reference to small and medium enterprises, business, stores, accomodation and, generally, all the advertisers who would like to reach a wider and more personalized target.

An effective, personalized advertising content relies on the analysis and knowledge of the customers it wants to address. That means that enterprises should acquire relevant information about their potential customers’ profile in order to design and customize their messages and their offer.

An augmented reality application, which offers the ability to collect information of a specific context, can be the right place where users (consumers) meet enterprises and their products/services. But before doing that, enterprises should e helped to understand what actually a context is: because not only  it refers to a place with geographical coordinates; a context is also a representation of users’ digital life.

The opinions expressed by users in their social profiles, their like/dislike preferences, the community they subscribe, the stores they’re customers of… all these elements could be effectively analyzed and the results could be collected and aggregated in an AR app in order to provide a specific user with the information, the content and the advertising he actually needs and appreciate. Because these recommendations and suggestion may turn to decisions and, as a consequence, into purchases or subscriptions.

Stafonrd University professor Marc Levoy and graduate student Andrew Adams are working on a project aimed to prototype an open source digital camera which can be customized, configured and programmed according to the users’ needs and expectations.

The article published by CrunchGear explains the brilliant idea of the Staford researchers. According to the story:

Frankencamera uses essentially off-the-shelf parts: a TI system on a chip, Canon EF lenses, a generic LCD screen, and a Nokia N95’s photo sensor of all things. It’s ugly, bulky, and fragile, but that’s the way prototypes tend to be. [...] The setup they’ve created (it runs Linux) lets them control and program each aspect of the camera with precision. With a standard API they could release it into the wild with a few prototypes and hackers would be able to go to town on it. 

In the following video, the researchers tell more about the hardware and the software used to assembly this prototype and about the powerful computational photography features enabled.

The open source approach will help users to obtain outstanding results when taking photos and not with a complicated and time consuming post processing. As physorg observes:

Virtually all of the features of the Stanford camera – focus, exposure, shutter speed, flash, etc – are at the command of software that can be created by inspired programmers anywhere.

This means that the digital camera could be also associated to a dedicated app store populated by a miriad of digital imaging applications developed by firms independent programmers and aimed to take a complete control of the digital camera features in order to take better pictures and unleash photographers’ creativity.

In other words, an open source device can be the seed to grew a new ecosystem, based on a community of developers. It is not easy to predict if this innovative approach will succeed in a sort time and how the players involved in the digital imaging industry will react (compete? cooperate?); for the time being, the idea is quite impressive and exciting. We will see how it will be developed in the next month.

More information about the open source Frankecamera can be found in the following websites and blog:

• CrunchGear
• Stanford University channel on YouTube
• Stanford Camera 2.0
• Stanford News article
• Physorg article
• Coolest Gadegts article
• Make Blog article

By the way, Frankencamera is not the only open source camera project. Elphel camera, developed by Russian scientist Filippov, is described and explained in this paper.

Unfortunately both the video and the source are in japanese only so that it’s not easy to understand how actually this game works.

[vimeo 5991488 nolink]

Apparently it’s a tabletab baseball game with an overlay of augmented reality information.

The game is promoted by AR3Bros group who have also published another AR application based on Twitter and playing cards. Skip to 01:45 to see it in action.

[vimeo 5536550 nolink]

This blog has already reported about the new application stores designed on iTunes’ model and deployed by mobile phones manufacturers, software vendors and mobile network operators. Here and here you can find previous entries about Nokia Ovi, Vodafone, Windows Marketplace and others.

Also Samsung, the korean manufacturer which is very popular in Italy in terms of sales (probably it comes after Nokia), has recently announced the opening of an application store, which is now in beta version.

As Engadget reports,

The imaginatively named Samsung Application Store launches on September 14 for British, French, and Italian Omnia and I8910 HD handsets, later coming to the Omnia II and OmniaLITE as well as users in various other nations.

Samsung a big manufacturer with hundred million customers worlwide and a huge offer of smartphones. The availability of a dedicated application store is the attempt to build an effective ecosystem aimed to replicate the success gained by Apple with iTunes. But, like Nokia, Samsung differs from Apple because the Korean maker is not focused on just one model but can promote innovative applications for a wider range of multimedia smartphones.