A free ESA app released today turns a popular iPhone-controlled ‘home drone’ into a spacecraft. The augmented reality game lets owners of Parrot AR.Drone quadcopters attempt dockings with a simulated International Space Station while flying their drones for real – in the process helping to improve robotic rendezvous methods. This new AstroDrone app is part of a scientific crowdsourcing project by ESA’s Advanced Concepts Team, gathering data to teach robots to navigate their environments. “People intuitively assess their position and motion in relation to their surroundings in various ways, based on what they see before them,” explained team research fellow Guido de Croon. “This new app lets us crowdsource examples of this process in practice, as a first step to reproducing it with artificial intelligence. AstroDrone Access the video “For ESA, the result could be much more autonomous spacecraft that can reliably manoeuvre, dock or land themselves.” (via Smartphone app turns home drone into spacecraft / Technology / Our Activities / ESA) iTunes Link
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A free ESA app released today turns a popular iPhone-controlled ‘home drone’ into a spacecraft. The augmented reality game lets owners of Parrot AR.Drone quadcopters attempt dockings with a simulated International Space Station while flying their drones for real – in the process helping to improve robotic rendezvous methods.

This new AstroDrone app is part of a scientific crowdsourcing project by ESA’s Advanced Concepts Team, gathering data to teach robots to navigate their environments.

“People intuitively assess their position and motion in relation to their surroundings in various ways, based on what they see before them,” explained team research fellow Guido de Croon.

“This new app lets us crowdsource examples of this process in practice, as a first step to reproducing it with artificial intelligence. AstroDrone Access the video

“For ESA, the result could be much more autonomous spacecraft that can reliably manoeuvre, dock or land themselves.” (via Smartphone app turns home drone into spacecraft / Technology / Our Activities / ESA)

iTunes Link

Source: esa.int

prostheticknowledge:

Piksel Bacteria 

iOS Augmented Reality game where red pixel bacteria feed on edges, and is based on a scientific discovery from playing an Atari game:

PikselBacteria is an augmented reality game for iPhone/iPad. It focuses on the bacterium pikselum. The bacterium was discovered in 1985 in the USSR by the scientist Lars Rodkov. He first thought he found a glitch in a bootleg of river raid (an atari 2600 game). But then he discovered, that it was a bacterium living in displays. PikselBacteria are feeding on pixel-edges. They are very rare. Therefore Rodkov developed an attractor to approach and cultivate these bacteria.

Based on his research, And-or developed a game in which you may grow these short-lived bacteria with your camera.

You breed the short-lived bacteria with your camera. Give them food by taking them to an edge and start moving the camera along this edge - and the bacteria will breed instantly and take you to the edge.

Gain research points in growing the bacteria as long as you can! Your highscore shows that you are an avid researcher and observer. Press the icon in the lower right corner of the display and send a picture of the sighted bacteria to the website! Or store it in your photo album for proof.

More information, and links to download the free game, can be found on the project’s website here

(via gamefreaksnz)

Source: pikselbacteria.ch

Google is working on a set of heads-up display glasses that will deliver information to the wearer in real-time. Google employees told the Times that the Google goggles are set to go on sale by the end of the year, and they’re expected to cost “about as much as a current smartphone.” The glasses will feature a small screen positioned a few inches from the wearer’s eye, and they’ll be equipped with GPS and motion sensors. (via Google Augmented Reality Glasses Update of the Day - TDW Geeks)
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Google is working on a set of heads-up display glasses that will deliver information to the wearer in real-time.

Google employees told the Times that the Google goggles are set to go on sale by the end of the year, and they’re expected to cost “about as much as a current smartphone.”

The glasses will feature a small screen positioned a few inches from the wearer’s eye, and they’ll be equipped with GPS and motion sensors. (via Google Augmented Reality Glasses Update of the Day - TDW Geeks)

Source: geeks.thedailywh.at

Dear augmented reality, We’ve been following your progress along the hype curve and would like to welcome you to the trough of disillusionment. The market’s excitement over the past few years was palpable; technophiles were waiting with bated breath for everything you promised: a paradigm shift that would let us interact with data in our native environment, the merger of virtual and actual. You delivered flying corporate logos hovering over QR codes on small screens that don’t even share our natural field of view. Where are the killer apps you promised us, augmented reality? We want Minority Report interfaces and personalised ads in subway tunnels. We’ve been impatiently waiting for the Babel fish of Hitchhiker lore and the kind of input devices promised in Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age. (via An open letter to augmented reality (Wired UK))
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Dear augmented reality,

We’ve been following your progress along the hype curve and would like to welcome you to the trough of disillusionment. The market’s excitement over the past few years was palpable; technophiles were waiting with bated breath for everything you promised: a paradigm shift that would let us interact with data in our native environment, the merger of virtual and actual.

You delivered flying corporate logos hovering over QR codes on small screens that don’t even share our natural field of view. Where are the killer apps you promised us, augmented reality? We want Minority Report interfaces and personalised ads in subway tunnels. We’ve been impatiently waiting for the Babel fish of Hitchhiker lore and the kind of input devices promised in Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age. (via An open letter to augmented reality (Wired UK))

Source: wired.co.uk

The chain has updated its Cup Magic iPhone and Android app from the holidays with a Valentine’s Day twist: If you have the app and put the cups within your phone’s field of vision, your phone will display images of heart-shaped flower petals flying off the cup. You can also send a video of the scene to your beloved via email or Facebook. (via Starbucks Makes Valentine’s Day an Augmented Reality [VIDEO])

Source: Mashable

DARPA, the Pentagon’s blue-sky research wing, announced yesterday that Innovega has developed for the agency a new breed of contact lenses that allow “a wearer to view virtual and augmented reality images without the need for bulky apparatus” and that allow users to focus on both faraway objects and images placed very close to the eye. (via DARPA Invests In Megapixel Augmented-Reality Contact Lenses | Popular Science)

Source: popsci.com