Augmented reality (AR) has finally been brought to mainstream, albeit dated, print media. Esquire showcased AR in the December 2009 issue of their high-profile magazine --  but that’s really all that happened. Anyone with the issue of the magazine and a webcam can experience Esquire’s AR goodness. They’ve littered the issue with AR markers, so there’s plenty of content to explore. When holding up the magazine cover, the marker under Robert Downey, Jr. explodes into an AR-ified video. There’s bunch of random letters floating in space with a cutout video of RDJ doing what he does best: spout off-kilter, random phrases. Every time you turn the marker 90 degrees, another floating video of Robert Downey Jr. appears. Going through the rest of the markers tucked into the magazine content produces roughly the same experience. The only exception is the videos and scenes around them are slightly different. Built by The Barbarian Group (TBG), this AR extravaganza was released upon the world as a self-contained piece of software. This 71MB download is a highly unorthodox and frustrating approach to provide such a widely available AR experience. Certainly there are some benefits to building a custom piece of software. For instance, the marker detection was surprisingly good. However, when AR is already available in Flash, why force people to download your own one-use software? Plus, the performance of the software hit way under par. Aside from it crashing the first time and bogging down my computer, it ran at about 5 frames a second. Flash should have been the platform of choice. Looking past the sub-par performance, the actual AR-iness left a lot to be desired. There are two basic parts to AR: reality and augmentation. It looks as if Esquire and TBG decided to throw both AR essentials out the window. Their reality was in grayscale and through a strange white gradient. Unless my webcam only operates in grayscale (which it doesn’t), then I should be seeing an unadulterated, full-color feed from my webcam. And what’s with that gradient? My guess is it’s an attempt to make the AR content more visible. Ideally this would be accomplished by better design. Looking past their strange reality, the augmentation didn’t score any better. We see reality in three dimensions, so augmented reality should also be in three dimensions. This application just put 2D video and graphics in a 3D space. That isn’t augmenting reality, but a stylized way of playing a video. If the content was interactive 3D objects and animations that engaged users with a dynamic experience, it would have been a richer way to integrate augmented reality. In addition Esquire could have utilized more stylized, graphic markers rather than the very obvious and clunky tag-style markers. They could have even used markerless tracking -- especially if requiring users to download a special piece of software. There is still that one quality that redeems this high-profile yet under-utilized mass exposure. The AR community has been growing swiftly, but every new technology takes time to get mainstream exposure and gain everyday traction. Esquire has provided just that, and tons of it.

Sean Erickson from our .NET development team headed west to L.A. for PDC last week. Since not all of us could go, we asked him to fill us in on the highlights. Here's what we missed: This year’s PDC didn’t have the didn’t have the same wow factor as last year’s, which was sprinkled with major announcements (the Surface SDK, Windows 7 beta and Azure services). The only major announcement this year was the beta release of Silverlight 4 and the roadmap to its official release. But what was lacking in major announcements was made up for with an overriding theme of how to use all the recent releases. It was like they were saying "Here’s what we showed you last year. Here’s what we’ve done to it since then. Here’s how to use it. Now start using it." And that's a good thing. A lot of the ideas and concepts from last year are now actually implemented and are available to start using. Here's some of the coolest. Silverlight 4 This is what will put Silverlight on a more level playing field with Flash. They've added printing support, Webcam and audio integration, the and the ability to host HTML and Flash content inside the Siliverlight plug-in. There's a new user option to allow out of browser apps to run outside the sandbox (think Air, except you can run the same app on the Web and locally with no recompile). An application can run with access to local file system, launch applications and access drives and sensors. It's got a 30 percent faster load time and increased performance (it was said to be twice as fast). You can share reference DLLs between .NET 4 and Silverlight 4 with no need to recompile. And this release has full binding and command structure. SQL Azure With the changes made since last year, SQL Azure will look and act almost exactly like a local instance of SQL Server. There are still some limitations, but the vast majority of SQL Server users could move to SQL Azure pretty seamlessly. Windows 7 Sensors and Location Windows 7 comes with a full API that gives us abstracted access to any sensors on the local machine (GPS, Ambient Light, Accelerometer). A good example of where this would be useful is a map application that defaults to search near your current location. Also, when Windows 7 Embedded comes out for Windows phones, you could add the lat/long to the metadata for any picture taken and have an exact location for every picture. For even more PDC action, check out these session videos: Day 2 Keynote by Steven Sinofsky, Scott Guthrie and Kurt DelBene Silverlight 4 Overview User Experience