Augment This! (Issue #8) by Thomas K Carpenter is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

Augment This! (Issue #7) by Thomas K Carpenter is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

Augment This! (Issue #6) by Thomas K Carpenter is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

Augment This! (Issue #5) by Thomas K Carpenter is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

The Laws of Unintended Consequences.  Marketers beware.

Augment This! Issue #4 by Thomas K Carpenter is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

 
Okay, so I stooped to rickrolling.  Sue me. 

If you haven’t seen them yet (and you’ll need them to get this comic): Issue #1 and Issue #2.

Augment This! (Issue #3) by Thomas K Carpenter is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

I’m a huge fan of games: board, card, sports, computer, console or even just seeing who can throw a wad of paper into a trashcan.  The promise of adding augmented reality to these games is one of the reasons I’m excited about the technology. 

The team at the AEL research lab at Georgia Tech brings us a video of an AR table top game called Art of Defense.

The main worry I’ve had about using hand-held units like smart-phones to play table top AR games is the arm fatigue and the limited viewing area.  At least the limited viewing area concern has been reduced, but I’m still unsure of the arm fatigue.  The game itself looks interesting (I’m a fan of Tower Defense games) and I think they’ve done a good job of applying AR. 

Their stated goal is:

The goal of this research is to explore the affordances and constraints of handheld AR interfaces for collaborative social games, and to create a game that leverages them as fully as possible. The results from the user study show that the game is fun to play, and that by tightly registering the virtual content with the tangible game pieces, tabletop AR games enable a kind of social play experience unlike non-AR computer games. We hope this research will inspire the creation of other handheld augmented reality games in the future, both on and off the tabletop.

Based on the video I think they’ve done an exempliary job.

And if you missed Issue #1.

Augment This! (Issue #2) by Thomas K Carpenter is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

Today I’m debuting the world’s first augmented reality comic!

(though I’m sure to be proved wrong on that claim)

This is not an AR comic “using” augmented reality, but is “about” it.  I wanted to capture some of the humorous aspects of augmented reality and its applications.  A web comic seemed like the best medium, so I enlisted a friend who’s an illustrator to do the artwork.  I’m going to do this weekly for the summer and see how it goes.  Comments or email are always welcome. 

If you’re wondering why the last panel changed, its in “chibi” manga style.  When characters have overblown emotions, the characters become more exaggerated.  While I’m familiar with manga, having spent time in Japan, I didn’t know all the nuances, so I thought I’d better point that out. 

Hope you all enjoy the comics in the upcoming weeks.

Augment This! (Issue #1) by Thomas K Carpenter is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.