Augmented Reality

ClipDrop Lets You Copy and Paste Objects from The Real World Into Photoshop.

I’m always on the look out for new tools that can help improve my workflow, or reduce painstaking tasks in applications like Photoshop and Illustrator from Adobe. Today I discovered one of those new tools.

Paris based developers Cyril Diagne and Jonathan Blanchet have developed a brilliant app called ClipDrop. ClipDrop lets you take photos of objects in the real world and place them into programs on your desktop computer. Using augmented reality and AI, ClipDrop can extract objects, people, drawings, and text, and then paste them into desktop applications.

It’s pretty slick, especially the text extraction, and i could see this being used quite a bit for a variety projects.

My only gripe is, like so many other applications these days, you can’t just buy it. ClipDrop has a subscription based model that costs $79.99 a year. Although it looks like it might still be on sale for $39.99. Either way, subscriptions suck as far as I’m concerned. I’m tired of getting nickle and dimed in perpetuity for a tool I could use daily. Yes I’d pay a bit more for a one time purchase.

You don’t see carpenters subscribing to hammer and saw services each year. Hey that might be a million dollar opportunity.

The Future via HoloLens.

I love seeing old images and films about how people thought the future was going to be. Sometimes they were pretty close, other times they were really off. Either way, it’s always entertaining. If you look at the way the 1950’s and 60’s saw the 21st century we should all be riding around in flying cars, piloted by our personal robots while we eat food that was instantly processed out of thin air.

back in the late 1990’s Virtual Reality goggles and software were white-hot for a quick blip and then faded into the background. Recently Facebook has brought it back to the forefront by spending billions on their product. Google launched Glass which they have also have recently announced they will be stopping development on, and Now Microsoft has jumped into the futures game with HoloLens.

Like all those visions of the future from the past, all three of these tech giants see our future with headsets that augment our reality with 3D visions and gesture controlled virtual reality seamlessly blended into our real world. The video has grabbed more than 10 million views on YouTube in less than a week, and it looks pretty compelling. There is a prediction that this could launch in 2016, but I doubt it will look like this when it does.

I still can’t see people wearing large clunk headsets all day long, and virtual reality replacing your expensive flat screen TV. What I can see is this being used in business for training, education, product approval, collaboration, etc. None the less the Microsoft vision of the future looks pretty slick, and if only half of this happens it would be pretty exciting.

“Sensory Overdrive”. Land Rover’s Interactive Print Campaign.

This might seem a bit gimmicky but the results are pretty impressive. Y&R NYC created an interactive print campaign with social hooks for the new Land Rover Sport. Using Blippar’s Augmented Reality technology, readers of the ad were encouraged to use their smartphones to unlock additional interactive content. This gave readers an opportunity to experience the car in a tangible-digital way, activated from the large scale print campaign. The campaign became one of Blippars top five campaigns of all time and generated over 66,000 interactions in the first week of deployment.

The video below highlights what the interactive ad actually did and is worth a quick view. This is another great example of how print, and mobile are merging, and how publishing is embracing technology to continue to make the medium viable. I have a feeling we are going to see more and more of this kind of thing in the future. I guarantee as it becomes more ubiquitous, the number of interactions will continue to grow.

“InAir TV”. SeeSpace Blurs the Lines of Your TV Experience.

A few years ago as CES wrapped up I posted about the beginning of the convergence between TV, your computer, and other content mediums. While the progress has been slow, it is definitely underway. Now days almost every TV, Blueray player, and DVD player is net connected with smart apps that allow for additional content delivery. Other hardware devices like the Roku box, Logitech’s Review, and Google’s Fiber initiative are continuing to blur the lines between a passive TV experience, and a deeper, richer interactive experience.

As CES winds down, one of the more exciting things to come from it this year is SeeSpace’s InAir TV, which brings an augmented reality experience to your TV set. InAir TV places Web content inline with the consumers’ TV viewing experience, without having to switch to a second screen. This creates a completely new dynamic medium similar to the UI?UX in the movie “Minority Report”.

The InAir TV which is still in KickStarter phase, involves using augmented reality technology to overlay additional content analyzed from what you are watching. The secondary content floats on a 3D layer between the TV picture and the viewer if you have a 3D TV. This second layer of content creates a more interactive, intuitive, and dynamic viewing experience. For example, if you are watching a Formula 1 race, you would be able to pull up the drivers, their stats, track conditions, leader info, points and standings, plus more. Instead of shrinking the picture on your TV screen to fit the additional information in, it would float above, or beside enhancing the viewing experience.

The hardware is controlled in two ways. The first allows you to control InAir TV using your smartphone using its screen as a track pad. The second takes it to the next level by allowing you to use gesture control via a Kinect, or Leap controller.

SeeSpace will be launching a Kickstarter campaign later this month and will be available to pre-order for $99 later this year.