TechMedia

Reading an article in this month’s Adobe Edge got me thinking again about augmented reality. I blogged about augmented reality back in March, so I was fascinated to see a tutorial on how to customize this technology yourself.

Augmented Business Card from jonas on Vimeo.

Reading this sparked me to research the topic further, which led me to an interesting site for the creation of augmented reality business cards
that can:

• let clients can easily get in touch with you via phone, SMS, E-mail or various social networks directly in the application
• let clients know what you are up to using various social networks (e.g. Twitter)
• show your portfolio
• let users navigate through images/video/3D models using gestures

The site says that a front-end tool for creating the presentation files is still under development, but the potential uses for this technology has got me thinking about how this might be applied to other areas.

For a more advanced tutorial on this augmented-reality technology, watch this 22-minute long Introduction to Augmented Reality video which lets you learn the basics of creating an AR application using the FLARToolKit.

But it comes with the warning: Not recommended for beginners.

Another jaw-dropping technology is Layar, the world’s first mobile augmented reality browser.

Can’t wait till they make a version for Yellowknife, but I guess it could be a while so I will try to be patient.

At the beginning of this video, Martin Moore of News Standards Trust tells the story about how United Airlines’ stock lost a billion dollars after a series of improbable coincidences pushed a years-old story about United going bankrupt to the front of Google News. This perfectly illustrates a danger from reading unsorted news stories online.

To aid search engines and end users differentiate relevant news more precisely, the Media Standards Trust has partnered with the Associated Press to launch a new ‘microformat’ for metadata in news stories.

A recent press release from the Media Standards Trust states that the metadata will give information on:

• what the story is about
• where it was written
• who wrote it
• where it was published
• the news principles it adheres to (if any)
• any usage rights associated with it

I applaud this experiment, not only could it help determine the quality and relevance of your research but would allow for filtered search options.

For more information on this new microformat, visit Value Added News.

Another technology to aid searches also caught my interest this week, WolframAlpha, a ‘computational knowledge engine’ (via Wired magazine).

Now in Beta, WolframAlpha is described as the “first step in an ambitious, long-term project to make all systematic knowledge immediately computable by anyone.”

WolframAlpha doesn’t just link to pages about a topic, it pulls data from various sources and recombines it on the fly. This technology will be huge for all kinds of research.