Head Mounted Displays, DIY Augmented Reality And More At InsideAR

I was able to attend Metaio’s InsideAR 2011 conference last week in Munich and check out many new and updated Augmented Reality concepts at the event. Several concepts I saw at the trade show portion resonated with where consumer AR is headed and some were merely for entertainment. But pretty much everything I saw tried, in some way, to push the envelope of technical possibility. I saw some cool new AR Head Mounted Displays (HMDs) from Vuzix and Sony (although Sony would not let me photograph their prototype), lots of furniture configurators, augmented textbooks, a DIY content authoring system and more.

If you’ve read some of my posts here you will know that I am an Augmented Reality geek. Smitten the first time I watched The Terminator and his neato heads up display; I have pondered the concept ever since.

I could try to describe the demos and products I saw at InsideAR, but instead I captured as many of the relevant examples as I could, on video, because a picture is worth…well, you know. In any event, the concepts/products I saw that seemed the most compelling and relevant were the Vuzix HMD, Metaio’s Creator software and the augmented textbook by linked-concept.de

Here are links to all the companies in the videos.

Vuzix
Metaio
linked-concept.de
Bosch
Kreativagentur-Thomas.de
Vanija