Comment received from Stu Fleming.
September 28, 2010 at 9:53 pm
. . . can finally talk about it.
Renee Lee came up with a gem of an idea – to provide an augmented reality experience of Dunedin’s heritage, arts and culture. This was presented at the Hearings into potential reuse of Carisbrook.
Working as a collaborative, Tim Calder, Renee, Pierre-Em de la Bussiere and I have developed and refined the idea to include the development of an augmented reality platform that will enable users to roam around the city, seeing rich images of the history of buildings, locations and getting a real fun, engaging experience with the city as a whole.
We back this up with a free wireless access layer that has been quietly constructed this year to provide coverage across a large portion of the central city and suburbs by my company (WIC). This allows us to deliver huge amounts of digital data onto the platform at very low cost.
The potential of this platform is enormous. We believe it is groundbreaking. We are extremely pleased to have been granted project funding through the EDU’s Industry Project Fund, announced today.
Renee will be the project lead to drive this through to delivery while local company iVisit will develop the platform.
Renee’s blog post on this:
http://blog.worknow.co.nz/2010/09/dun-edin-augmented-reality/Wicked Networks/WIC media release:
http://www.wickednetworks.co.nz
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### ODT Online Wed, 29 Sep 2010
Tech initiatives get $300,000 DCC funding
By David Loughrey
A new smartphone application that will give tourists and Dunedin residents a direct view into the past is one of three technology-based business initiatives to get almost $300,000 from the Dunedin City Council. The Dunedin augmented reality industry project will allow people to use the camera on their phone to view Dunedin scenes, then overlay that with historic views showing, for instance, the old stock exchange building, cable cars on High St or videos showing the construction of newer facilities like the Forsyth Barr Stadium.
Read more + Photo
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Posted by Elizabeth Kerr
What if? Dunedin... 
The best place to develop and host this, inspired.
Very clever people.
Previous references to augmented reality at What if?
8.1.10 NAi launches SARA & 3D-augmented reality
[related post: 20.11.09 If the ball gets dropped]
29.1.10 Tweet your building and MORE
A lovely idea. I see the platform and the network are chosen, funding for them is in place and the heritage still exists (just); but my worry is that the huge job of researching the history of our heritage buildings and matching it with images, such that the project could be realised, has not been funded. If this research already existed then publishing it in this form would only lack what these people can provide. But producing the content for this wonderful idea appears to have been overlooked.
If only we hadn’t spent all our money on the stadium
Hi Ro,
We have access to a wealth of material through the DCC and Otago Settlers Museum archives. The platform will be open access with a content management system for anybody to create their own content and contribute research and stories from their experience. This will also tap into the Romantic City work that Sam Mann did which was previously funded.
We will have arrangements in place for the content development to be funded; we think we have a model for that which will emerge in the next few months that makes it sustainable and doesn’t require us to go to Council for funding for content development.
Regards,
Stu
I know that material exists in all of the Settlers Museum, Hocken Collections & DCC Archives. But I also know that they’re not organised in a way to make publishing it in any media anything other than a labour for many experienced and qualified researchers. I am very very glad to hear that you have funding possibly organised to facilitate this and I hope you’re not underestimating the resources necessary to it. I also wish you the very best for the project because it is something that I would love to see happen.
Casual Links:
http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2009/08/augmented-reality/ [videos]
http://www.techvert.com/london-museum-releases-cool-augmented-reality-app/
http://cultureandcommunication.org/tdm/s10/04/27/augmented-reality-and-the-future/
http://designmind.frogdesign.com/blog/envisioning-your-future-in-2020.html
So will it run on Layar (http://www.layar.com) – something I now see being advertised on TV by cellphone companies overseas as a reason to buy their phones but is sadly rather muted in its community support in Dunedin
Just wanted to clarify a couple points:
At the Carisbrook hearing in June I raised the idea of Augmented Reality Gaming but after the “whatever crazy lady” looks that comment garnered I looked to find an easier way to get this technology adopted.
Attending the City’s Future Forum in July it was pretty easy to see that our community places immense value on our Heritage as integral to our identity, which informed my submission on the Dunedin City Digital Strategy
“…If we are to raise the public perception of Dunedin as a technology leader then we need to provide residents and visitor with an exciting experience of technology at work in the city.
I submit that the city fund development of mobile augmented reality technology that showcases the history of Dunedin: as per the example of Museum of London|Street Museum. http://www.museumoflondon.org.uk/MuseumOfLondon/Resources/app/you-are-here-app/index.html
Dunedin has the people and the history to do a great job of this, with the potential to have it in place in time for RWC….”
@ro Thanks for your support:) would be a crying shame if we’d received funding for a project in which I had failed to take into account content development ~ especially considering that the quality of content will define the caliber of our resulting mobile Ap.
Content development, is one of our two main areas of work, fortunately a wealth of research already exists.
As a collaborative project we look forward to working with our local experts to select and develop narratives that showcase multiple perspectives on Dunedin’s heritage.
@anonymous9 No we are not building on the layar platform we work to develop a NZ owned and operated alternative.
What Dunedin needs is more businesses which make profits from paying customers, not ever more projects which need handouts paid for by the ratepayer.
Alistair this platform will provide a mechanism to do exactly that
Pity about Layar – you’ll have to pay for your platform being ported to all the different phones rather than leveraging off the work they’re doing – they give their platform away so you wont make much money developing your own – they seem to have serious VC money behind them, a decided head start and OEM contracts already in place.
I see high-rotation Samsung TV ads highlighting Layer on their new phones when I travel in Asia, it seems to be being pushed to customers really hard right now.
(not trying to rain on your parade here, just making sure you know there’s very serious platform competition out there so you do your due diligence and don’t throw money in a direction where you wont make it back – platform plays like this are in general very risky and being second makes it riskier still)
@Anonymous9 ~ Augmented Reality technology has existed and been in use for more than 15 years. The major industry players currently include:-
# Qualcomm http://developer.qualcomm.com/dev/augmented-reality/developer-challenge pure play SDK available
# http://www.junaio.com/
# http://www.metaio.com/ pure play SDK available
# http://www.t-immersion.com/en,solution-presentation,559.html SDK available
# Popcode http://www.popcode.info/whatispopcode Developer API available free
# Layar http://www.layar.com/ http://site.layar.com/company/blog/new-layar-video-discover-play-floaticons/ pure play SDK available, &
# Hoppala http://www.hoppala.eu/ free CMS no coding required to build content for the Layar platform
There are others too & it is my job to be up-to-date with our industry. I am very open to learning and I’d welcome any new information you’d like to share.
You can follow me @lee0007 for more information about our #AR industry.
Renee Lee
Updating this thread. We are field testing the application at present on the wireless infrastructure and with content coming from the material collated from local contributors by Renee.