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hi! i’m Tom, founder and creative director of POKE.  i live in CT, work in NYC, munch on tasty digital cookies, collect lunchboxes, take lots of photos and buy lots of t-shirts.  mmm…cookies. i’m passionate about creating a safe internet for kids, cookies, really great Italian cooking, all kinds of dogs, digital photography and the power of technology and how it affects our daily lives. i’d love to tell you i read a lot - but i just don’t. so there. Psychotic.

Entries in alternate reality (2)

Alternate reality meets the iPhone

Rad, rad, rad! Meet Nearest Tube, but Acrosshair. One of the first augmented reality apps to go live in the iPhone AppStore.

Wandering around the UK and want to locate the closest Underground station? Simply look at your iPhone! This app displays All 13 lines of the underground network, pointing them out with colored arrows.

Users can see the nearest station, what direction they are in relation to their location, how far and what tube lines/stations etc. If you continue to tilt the phone upwards, you will see stations further away, as stacked icons.

Available to Apple iPhone 3GS users. Enjoi!

alternate reality meets Twitter

squidder barcode t shirt 480x342

Dear Squidder, you win.

why, you ask?

The genius flash-in-the-pants and optical-recognition lovers that go by the name Squidder have been showing off two new systems that tie augmented reality into Twitter. Their first project is a t-shirt with a FLAR barcode that, when recognized by a webcam-enabled computer, pulls up the encoded Twitter username and displays their latest tweet as a video overlay. Rediculious. (That means awesome, Mom.)

Augmented Reality T-Shirts:

(Please visit here for more info on the Augmented Reality Shirt Project.)

The second task, meanwhile, is cutting out the barcode and having the system recognize users by face. Redonkulous. (Even more awesomer than rediculous.)

Facial Recognition meets Twitter:

(Please visit here for more info on the Augmented Reality Shirt Project.)

Hokay soh, the facial-recognition system isn’t totally working; it currently doesn’t actually recognize individual users, just any face moving into frame. However software that can do that is already out there, and merely requires some more time and effort pulling everything together.

Of course, Twitter is just one source of information; Squidder is also suggesting that the system could call up a Facebook profile, or in fact just about anything.

Is it all getting all Minority Report in here?

[via Official UK LG blog]