Although many have already tried to make Augmented Reality games, most have failed miserably at making something that’s actually fun to play.

Although I haven’t played it myself yet, NerdHerder seems to have done it though.

As IT Manager – or nerd herder if you must – you need to get your IT staff stimulated to work. But the easily distracted and short tempered nerds make your job difficult.

The cool thing about this game is that it’s reference image based and it uses that reference for it’s internal coordinate system. The office cubicles are rendered on top of it and move your phone around will cause whatever is dangling from your fishing rod to swing.

The idea is original and looks well executed based on the video below. Again, I haven’t played it myself yet for I have no printer!
However, as someone on their website already said: “This is the first augmented reality game I’ve ever actually wanted to play“

As part of the Appril apps festival in Amsterdam an evening was dedicated to Augmented Reality and 3 speeches were given by:

• Remco Vroom, co owner of TAB worldmedia
• Maurice Groenhart, product manager of the Stiktu app (Part of Layar)
• Michiel Roukens, father of the soon to be realized product “OWNR”

OWNR

Most interesting to hear was the chat by Michiel Roukens. Although not strictly an Augmented Reality project it definately is original.

Everyone into extreme sports where doing a cool trick is the goal will love the idea. 

The platform is serve as a map of spots where extreme sporters can register the trick they did, earn credit for it from other sporters and thus become the “owner” of that spot. It allows one to get into the spotlights without actually being in competitive events. Upload a video (the evidence) of your trick and you’re on your way to fame and … broken bones.

Having skated for many years myself and still an enthusiastic snowboarder I really felt this idea has potential. 

For more info see www.ownr.fm

Michiel Roukens en yours truly

Stiktu

Maurice Groenhart gave us some insight in the way Layar’s has been developing and researching it’s newest product “Stiktu”. Although based on the same technology used in the Layar app, the use case and idea is completely different and way more social.

Although the app doesn’t have a whole lot of users yet, the idea is entertaining enough and might actually be found by a niche that can justify it’s existence.

The idea is fairly simple. Leave your comments, stickers, graphics on all kinds of printed objects/magazines/walls etc. for other to see. 

In contrary to actual graffiti Stiktu allows one to paste several things on the same object by allowing the user to browse through the pasted expressions.

Maurice Groenhart and me

Please drop me a line if you know another (serious) one.

BuildAR
Muzar / Visar

Today I had meeting with Remco Vroom from Tab Worldmedia.

It was highly interesting to hear their views on augmented reality and thus I’ll most certainly be visiting the event they are organizing in Amsterdam next wednesday, april 25th in “Pakhuis de Zwijger”. 

Also I got to know some new “AR names” of which I contacted one right away for I was in Amsterdam and this guy also lived there.

But that didn’t turn out the way I expected.

I got a friendly e-mail response that he was not in Holland right now and might actually not even return anymore! AR brought him new opportunities abroad which he grasped. He also confirmed AR is a good business to be in right now so that’s nice to know for us early AR adopters.

Altogether it was quite an interesting day today! If you’re in AR and you fell like connecting, drop me a line!

Q: But Menno, does it really have to be boring?
A: No! And to prove it we’ll make a boring card awesome instead. That way your customer will remember you for ever!

Q: That sounds amazing but how would you archieve that? 
A: By adding some Layar Augmented Reality magic of course ….. d’Oh!

Getting prepared

First of all let’s take a second to acknowledge that the sole purpose of a business card is to share contact information and hopefully make a potential customer remember you when he has business for you.

For this tutorial you’ll need:

1. a boring business card
2. the Layar application
3. a bit of web space to host the layer (only required if you really want to do it yourself)

Here’s the business card we’ll be awesomizing

Not bad for 5 minutes of fiddling, ey?

 And this is how it’s going to look once it’s “awesome”.

Please note that I'm a flower.

 Do you like the idea above but don’t you / can’t you do it yourself? Hire me and I’ll do it for you! (I promise to make it look better than the example above )

Here we go

To make your life easier I’ve added all the source files to this DIY Business Card archive so you don’t have to do any of the “hard work”.
Also there’s a working version of this Layar to be found online. Simply scan the reference image in the archive using Layar and you’ll either be taken right to it, OR someone else has used my reference image to do this tutorial and thus you’ll have to choose “DIY Business Card (diybusinesscard)”

Here’s the process broken down into these simple steps

1. Modify the JSON from the provided archive and replace the “your.server.com” parts by links to your publicly available web space.
   Note there’s more URL’s you might want to change.
2. Upload the json file + images directory the before mentioned web space.
3. Log into the Layar Publishing Environment with your developer account and click “Create a new layer!”.
4. Fill out the fields, using:
   1. API endpoint URL:
      The URL of the JSON file you just uploaded to your web spapce.
   2. Enable “Layar Vision”.
      Note that the Layer type now switched  to “3D and 2D objects in 3D space”
5. Now upload the provided reference image and define the height as 5.5cm (0.055)

It will take some time to process the reference image but that should be done in about 2 minutes. After this you can check your handy work using the Layar application.

There you go… that’s all. 
Keep reading if you want to know more about the mechanics of this layer.

The nitty gritty

Ok, time to dig into the details of this layer.

Special actions

The “call me” button opens the dialer with the phone number to be called already defined. Nifty ‘ey?
This is simply a matter of using action with a tel: link and the proper content type. Like this:

"actions": [{
	"uri": "tel:+31624484523",
	"label": "Call Me",
	"contentType": "application/vnd.layar.internal"
}]

The “Mail me” button is equally simple. Just create a link like you would in html. Simply mailto:someone@somewhere.com and the right content type and you’re done!

"actions": [{
	"uri": "mailto:myname@mydomain.com",
	"label": "Mail Me",
	"contentType": "application/vnd.layar.internal"
}]

Animation

You may also have noticed that my head is not only a flower, but it’s also spinning! 

Layar supports a bunch of simple animations such as rotation (over each x,y and/or z axis), scaling (also over the 3 axis’s) and translation (moving) over 3 axis’s.

This way you can do some simple animations and if you’re patient you can even combine animations using delay/speed and interpolation to generate a kind of path animations. But again, this requires patience and loads of testing. There might also be differences under the Android or the iPhone version of the Layar app.

Here’s the animation I used on the flower object. Simple but effective.

"animations": {
	"onCreate":[{
		"interpolation": "linear",
		"length": 8000,
		"from": -359,
		"to": 0,
		"delay": 0,
		"repeat": true,
		"type": "rotate",
		"axis": {
			"y": 0,
			"x": 0,
			"z": 1
		},
		"persist": true
	}]
}

That’s it!

Thanks for your attention.
For more information about actions, see my other tutorial “Add interaction using actions and asynchronous calls“ 

A booklet that was printed 6.000.000 times is being delivered to almost all households in Holland as I write this post and as always, a video was made to showcase the layar.

Usage on this one is pretty massive and will definately help Layar with their goal to become the one-stop-shop platform to use when reading a magazine or newspaper and unlock extra content through AR.

Speakers Academy is a company that calls itself a “lecture agency” and they supply expert speakers to all sorts of events all over the world. So, when you need an expert lecturing about space age technology, they can supply you with Dutch astronaut Wubbo Ockels amongst others. It ranges from anchormen to former French president Jacques Chirac.

As it is always hard to judge on beforehand if a speaker is the right person for your specific needs they’ve had me create a layer that allows the customers to see the various speakers in action.

By simply pointing your mobile phone running Layar at the pages of “Speakers Academy magazine, sprekersatlas 2012″ you can instantly get to know the candidates.

Literally more than one hundres videos and links to personal websites / profile pages make this catalogue way more interactive and useful.

See the video on the Layar blog for more details.

Would you like to have such an experience for your company? I am for hire

The reason for his festive mood is that he just got recognized as a Certified Layar Developer and member of the Layar Partner Network.

The LPN member logo from now on will be shown prominently on his site.

Will this be the beginning of a happy ever after? Stay tuned and find out!

Websites, mobile apps and other media all understand the importance of doing it so they do it frequently and try to make it as easy as possible for you to help them doing it!

Obviously I’m talking about sharing content on the famous social media sites Facebook and Twitter.

Social media have grown to be the power tools of the internet for generating traffic, increase ROI and, most important, to learn what drives their potential customers.

Layar Sharing API

Layar allows its developers to do just that and makes it even easier by allowing Facebook and Twitter sharing to happen in one go. Cool!

But, in my opinion, the documentation of this API doesn’t clearly show you how the shared content will be presented on those networks so I set forth and dedicated this post to the Layar Sharing API

The brief

Note: This article is an addition to Layar’s Sharing API specification on their wiki and only described sharing intents of type “message”.

The Layar sharing API allows you to do the following:

1. Share a layar or a link to some website on Facebook and Twitter,
2. Share a screenshot on Facebook, Twitter or mail it to someone,
3. Share a screenshot with the Layer’s developer.

And the variables available for your tweeking pleasure are:

• type – Type of content to share. Possible values are “message” or “screenshot”.
• title – The title of your post. Facebook only
• link – Optional content to link to. Facebook & Twitter
• icon – An icon that will be shown next to the post. Facebook only
• description – The description of the posting. Facebook only

The above used to confuse me until I wrote this post because as you may have noticed there is no parameter that defines the message that is to be posted on Twitter.

Facebook sharing

Check this example posts of a shared message on Facebook:

All the parameters you can configure in the Sharing API call are present in the Facebook post. Also the optional personal text the user may have added is present.

I doubt there’s any questions about this one.

Twitter sharing

Twitter sharing is a different story.

The only Sharing API parameters that you will actually see in a tweet is the optional link parameter.

The image above is the result of sharing to twitter without adding a personal message.
What happens is that Layar will take the Short Description as it is defined in the Layar Publishing Environment (where you configure your layer) and use that as a message.

Although it’s good to have fallback, it really is a shame one can’t customize the fallback message. The Short Description is pretty general and will most likely not say much about the item being shared in particular.

In the image above I’ve actually manually entered a message which is what shows up here.

About links

In both the Facebook and Twitter posts a link will always be present, even if you omitted the optional link parameter. In that case Layar will add a link to the layer’s info page on layar.com.

The link added to Twitter posts are automatically shortened using layar.it

Metrics

We can be short on this one: There’s none.
Layar does offer some metrics but unfortunately these do not include information such as video reproductions, hits on web pages (outbound or not) and successful sharing events. Information that is very valuable when trying to optimize usage of your layer. 

That’s all folks!

I hope this post makes it a bit easier to understand how to use the Layar Sharing API and what parameter does what.
Again, please note that this is not a full blown tutorial. It’s additional information on top of Layar’s own documentation.

Hang on tight. Next up is an article about metrics. What Layer measures and what you can add yourself! 

It’s great to see such a large newspaper pick up on new technologies albeit a bit careful by simply adding christmas wishes videos of well known Dutch actors and singers.

I would hereby like to invite de Telegraaf to have a chat about what I can do to make AR work for them.