Augmented Reality Cookies: Link to video and website for QKies, a new twist that blends cookies and AR.

QKies is a cooperative project of Juchem Gruppe, a German food trade company, and DFKI, the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence.  QKies is a special twist on baking cookies that involves the use of QR codes that people can share as they share cookies with others:

"Give your friends and acquaintances cookies, they send you directly to a specific site. For example, this can be a video on YouTube, a photo from Flickr or your own website."



Below is a picture from a blog post about QKies:

-Bemme51 

Here is an introductory video of the product, in German:

QKies - sag's mit Keksen from r3 media on Vimeo.

Below is a video created by Johannes Schoening of his augmented reality Christmas Cookies.  The idea for the concept, as you see, started out as a joke, after his wife asked him to bake some cookies for the holidays. 




Johannes worked as a senior researcher at DFKI and is now following his new motto,  "Baked to the Future" at "people interactive" (http://www.people-interactive.de/) in Cologne.

GarageBand on the iPad2 is Awesome!

For just $4.99, this app has given me hours of joy - and I've only had it for a week!  The first time I played around with it, I exclaimed that I no longer have a need for my Motif 8 keyboard.

(Seriously, my husband now thinks I'll be unloading my keyboard on eBay or Craigslist soon.)

Below are a couple of videos to give you an idea of what the iPad version of GarageBand is all about:

GarageBand for iPad



Be sure to visit soon for an update - I'll include videos of my own.

Link: Learn more about Google +

I'm writing this post from a cruise ship, so I'll write more about Google's spin on social networking upon my return. In the meantime, take a look at the Google+ "Learn more about Google+"site!


I also plan on writing a few posts about tablets, as I'm a new user of an iPad 2. BTW, Garage Band on the iPad 2 is awesome.

An Internet of Old Things as an Augmented Memory System: "Tales of Things" allows people to record multimedia stories about objects, linked via QR or RIFD tags.

The following article about "Tales of Things", an interesting augmented memory app, was recently selected for review by Personal and Ubiquitous Computing:

An Internet of Old Things as an Augmented Memory System

Ralph Barthel, Kerstin Leder, Andrew Hudson-Smith, Angelina Karpovich, Martin de Jode, Chris Speed, University College London /  Loughborough University

Authors' bios

After watching the following videos and exploring the Tales of Things website, I am sure that this sort of technology will have many uses in education.  Wouldn't it be fun to have a "tales of things" project for a homework assignment?!

In the following video, Chris Speed discusses the Tales of Things project:

Tales of Things Beta: Connecting anything with any media, anywhere!

TOTeM website

Tales of Things Press Release (pdf)

Tales of Things iPhone iPad App

Tales of Things Android App

Below is a video of how an old Fisher Price teaching clock can become part of a "tale of things":

RELATED

Tales of Things: The Internet of "Old" Things:  Collecting Stories of Objects, Places, and Spaces (pdf)  Ralph Barthel, Andrew Hudson-Smith, Martin de Jode, Benjamin Blundell, CASA Centre For Advanced Spatial Analysis, University College London, London, United Kingdom

In case you missed this: Microsoft Releases Kinect SDK Beta for PC

Kinect for Windows SDK Beta!   IT IS TRUE!!!!!


My Kinect and PC are waiting for my summer project.    What a great opportunity to "practice" programming over my 5 week summer break..... I already know C#, and I've done a little game programming (ie. AI for Game Development - using XNA Game Studio Express- it has been a while).  

-Photo credit: Microsoft Research


I have some cool ideas for basic games that might be good for the students I work with who have autism spectrum disorders... and some ideas that might be fun for my grand-baby.  I can't wait to have time to code again!   


Here's some info from the Microsoft Kinect for Windows SDK Beta website:


"The Kinect for Windows SDK beta is a programming toolkit for application developers. It enables the academic and enthusiast communities easy access to the capabilities offered by the Microsoft Kinect device connected to computers running the Windows 7 operating system."


"The Kinect for Windows SDK beta includes drivers, rich APIs for raw sensor streams and human motion tracking, installation documents, and resource materials. It provides Kinect capabilities to developers who build applications with C++, C#, or Visual Basic by using Microsoft Visual Studio 2010."


This SDK includes the following features:


Raw sensor streams
Access to raw data streams from the depth sensor, color camera sensor, and four-element microphone array enables developers to build upon the low-level streams that are generated by the Kinect sensor.
Skeletal tracking
The capability to track the skeleton image of one or two people moving within the Kinect field of view make it easy to create gesture-driven applications.
Advanced audio capabilities
Audio processing capabilities include sophisticated acoustic noise suppression and echo cancellation, beam formation to identify the current sound source, and integration with the Windows speech recognition API.
Sample code and documentation
The SDK includes more than 100 pages of technical documentation. In addition to built-in help files, the documentation includes detailed walkthroughs for most samples provided with the SDK.
Easy installation
The SDK installs quickly, requires no complex configuration, and the complete installer size is less than 100 MB. Developers can get up and running in just a few minutes with a standard standalone Kinect sensor unit (widely available at retail outlets)."

RELATED
Microsoft Releases Kinect for Windows SDK Beta

Nicholas Kolakowski, Application Development News, 6/16/11

Summer Blogging Plans - Lots of interesting updates -Sony's Tablet video(s), more to come...

I've been wrapping up the loose ends of the last few weeks of what turned out to be quite a busy school year,  so I haven't posted in about 10 days!    I have lots to cover, including interesting updates about a variety of tech companies I follow.


Today, I'm sharing a video from Sony that highlights the features of the company's iPad-like tablet in a creative way:


The video is the first of a 5-part campaign to promote the S1 and S2 Android tablets  For more information:


Sony Teases New Tablets With a Mysterious Video
Stan Schroeder, Mashable 6/17/11
Sony Launching 2 New Tablets, Both Run Android Honeycomb
Jolie O'Dell, Mashable, 4/26/11


Here's a previous teaser:

"Here's a preview of our two tablets - codename S1 and S2.With the S1 designed for comfort and S2 built for safe portability Sony enters the Tablet arena with two very distinct offerings."-Sony

Note: If you are a new visitor,  I work as a school psychologist in my "day job",  which can spill over to evenings and weekends at times...  I returned to school to take computer and technology courses back in the  '00s,  and started to blogging because it was a requirement for one of my courses.


I never stopped.  


My blogs still serve me well as on-line filing cabinets, since I have a fairly wide range of interests and I like to drill down deeper into topics that strike my fancy.  I'm curious that way.  Because of my interest in interactive multimedia technology,  most of my posts include video clips, photos, and links to interesting websites.