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The theme of last night’s session was Augmented Reality (AR) - Our Flash-head extraordinaire, Gaming Dave introduced the session by presenting a lovely piece of work produced for US energy giant GE.

The Tinnovation crew check out ecomagination!

The great thing about GE’s Ecomagination is that it is built entirely in Flash, utilising one of our current favourite plugins Papervision3D

A print mark is downloaded and printed, held up to the web cam on the computer running the app and then as if by magic a virtual world builds before your very eyes!

As the mark is moved around, left to right, near and far from the camera, the 3D model seemlessly angles and scales in line with position, creating the illusion it really has come right out the paper.

Check out Ecomagination here: http://ge.ecomagination.com/

We looked at other examples online including a great standalone app from Toyota available here.

Know any more? Let us know via a comment at the bottom of this blog!

So, moving on to the fun bit, what could we do with AR? Ideas thrown about included:

Virtual (or should that be Augmented!?) Ronnie Wood
Using some of we Ronnie footage we shot for RonnieWood.com build an app similar to Ecomagination that actually puts Ronnie on your “real world” desktop playing you a tune. Create the print mark, place it on your desk in view of your webcam and watch Ronnie magically appear out of your desk!

With multiple animations or instances of the animations running at the same time you could even build an augmented Rock Band!. Tie in some nice audio mixing and create a track right in front of your eyes!

Tank Battle
Using two print marks and models, create a version of the old school tank battle game. Position and angle your tank via the print mark then use the space bar to gauge the power of your shot.

Tetris
3D blocks fall from the sky rotate the print mark to rotate the block.

Puzzle Slider
Video or picture floats in the sky and by using the print mark you can move the blank space around to  complete the puzzle.

IKEA
Using photos or live cam feed of your room drop furniture in situ to see what it would look like in your house.

Tinnovation’s Nubbin
Have a cartoon cut-out style or a 3D nubbin walk on your desktop.

Got any good ideas for AR? Drop us a comment below!

Here at Tinnovation HQ we’ve been Google Maps fans since day one!

A great piece of tech that we’ve had fun with in the past, see Gaming Dave’s Google Racer here.

So we were very pleased to see the launch of Street View in the UK yesterday. Having scouted about for an hour or so we were even more pleased to see a couple of our crew represented!

First up, Head of Dev, the big Jay Burton with our ex-traffic manager, Liz:

View Larger Map

And coming up the rear, Head of Interactive, Gaming Dave and his lovely missus Christina:

View Larger Map

Brilliant! Have you spotted anything good on Street View yet? Drop us a link in the comments below!

What’s it spell? Or rather what does it create an acroynm of… RFID (Radio Frequency IDentification).

The best example of RFID in action is your trusty Oyster card. Each Oyster has an RFID chip holding your Travelcard or Pay As You Go details, when you touch it on the yellow receiver you pass the details through to the database.

Using a relatively cheap bit of RFID kit, set up and supplied by our guest star Iain “The Innovator” Millar - We triggered Play, Stop and Forward iTunes controls with just our boardroom lazy susan, some Post Its and a MacBook Pro.

It was relatively straight forward process to define the action the RFID tag should perform, and once programmed could be “stuck” to pretty much anything.

This stimulated a healthy discussion about possible uses, from both our team and other guest star Robbie “Caboose” Toay.

Stairway to heaven
Sneaking up to people going done tube escalators a putting stickers on them that correspond to a note, reader at the bottom plays the tune!

DVD collection
Putting sticker on your DVD collection so you can still browse via the nice covers, when you choose one you wave over the reader and it plays the relevant DVD from your previously digitised collection

Sympathetic music playlists
Each person has a sticker that correspond to their musical tastes, when in a room (office, bar etc.) the system knows who’s there and plays a sympathetic playlist!

Dating events
Readers hidden under mats lets you know who’s single unobtrusively

City wide events
All TFL stations, Hide & seek, Treasure hunt, pub crawl etc.

Membership cards
‘barman pours you drink as you enter….’

Table football
Readers behind goals, sticker on balls, tied into flash application, shows ‘Goal to Jamie!!’ when goal scored

Lazy Susan
Brilliant music playing system by rotating Susan….

Oyster cards
not sure what but the fact that everyone has got one and we could potentially tag everyone is pretty smart.
Key, Phone, Wallet
Reader on your door at home, if you have forgotten anything when leaving you house will stop you (via stickers on the key items)

Food descriptions in restaurants
When dishes arrive (Yo Sushi style) the list of ingredients and additional information displayed (history of the dish etc.)

Throwing badges
Dave’s Adobe badges have stickers put on them and when thrown onto the reader launch the relevant application

Kick a big bag of flour
Reader in a  big bag of flour sticker on your shoe – booting the bag sends an email

Theme tunes (current favourite)
Reader on the door we all have our own stickers that when we walk in trigger our ‘theme tune’ to be played

Watch this space for prototypes coming soon…