Wow, it’s January…

January 25th, 2010

Time for our regularly scheduled once-a-month blog post!

Well, it’s been quiet on the update / new project announcements front because we’ve been relatively busy working on stuff. Currently we have two projects in the pipe that will eventually see the light of day later this quarter. And here’s what we can say for now:

1. Aesthetec Studio was selected to be part of an exhibit design team for the brand-new Telus World of Science, in Calgary, Alberta, slated to open in the fall of 2011. The design process is underway, and we’re honored to be working along side a team of talented people.

2. We’re also working on a commercial project, involving something totally new and very challenging. There’s no touch sensors or blinking LEDs, but it will still make people do funny things.

And we finally, finally got around to getting our company name set up with the iPhone Developer Program – so one of these days, when we’re not working on the two things mentioned above, we’ll try to get around to publishing our million-dollar-killer app idea.

There’s also a new section of our website called “Our Notebook”, which we launched as an area to publish things of interests or technical notes worth sharing. On the bottom of the sidebar here, you’ll see the menu and hopefully we’ll be updating this section on a regular basis.

Til next time!

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Presenting Augmented Reality at MEIC5

November 27th, 2009

We presented our 3-month research & prototyping project in augmented reality for mobile at the Mobile Experience and Innovation Center event yesterday (Thursday, November 26) to a very receptive, mobile-aware crowd.

In short, our R&P project, partially supported by MEIC, aim to develop a toolkit for making augmented reality applications on mobile platforms. Half of the project was doing an industry survey of the state of AR (who’s doing what in regards to AR on mobile phones) and another half was dedicated to coding and development. We worked with a very bright intern from Ryerson University, Michael Lawrie, on the development end.

Even though AR has been gathering a steady stream of attention from the online advertisers and other media in the past two years, once we looked into it, we found that the development for both web-based and mobile phone applications are still quite difficult and resources are limited. The open source library, ARToolKit and its Flash ported (FLARToolKit) version have helped to push the development on the web end, but projects in the mobile space are, relatively speaking, rather sparse.

In particular, we were interested in making an AR application that overlay virtual objects onto public spaces (at specific locations) – this would have required the usage of both image recognition and location based services. Developing an AR apps with LBS is already available with the iPhone SDK and other platforms (and several apps have been launched in the past months), doing image recognition on the mobile phone, however, is not. We spent the past month developing some tools that would allow us to do image recognition on the iPhone, and while we are very aware of examples and demos that various companies have put on YouTube, we have yet to see a compelling working application.

At MEIC5, we presented our overview on the state of AR in mobile platforms, its highlights and pitfalls, and showed the progress of our own development. Unfortunately there was no video recording. We’ve made our slides available, but embedded video clips are not supported by slideshare.

Here’s Mark at MEIC5:

Our slideshare deck:

Thanks, MEIC!

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Aesthetec in Design Week

October 27th, 2009

We were recently featured in the ‘Rising Stars’ supplement of Design Week, the most well-read design publication in the UK. (!!!!)

The full article on Design Week

And many thanks to Francesca Grenato, our colleague from Fabrica, who scanned this page for us:

(click to view full size)

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Mark featured on Ignite Show!

September 22nd, 2009

Mark’s talk at the first Ignite Toronto was picked up and featured on the O’Reilly’s Ignite Show blog. Fun!

A bit about the Ignite Show: “Ignite captures the best of geek culture in a series of five-minute speed presentations on topics ranging from The Best Way to Buy a Car to Hacking Chocolate. … Every week, find out how some of the smartest minds on the planet dealt with this situation as your host, Brady Forrest, highlights a different talk from Ignites around the world.”

We’re very honored to be amongst the planet’s best geeks.

http://ignite.oreilly.com/2009/09/mark-argo-on-adapting-technology.html

Ignite’s version of the video on YouTube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B1qhUu0xX-4

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Mark at IgniteToronto

August 29th, 2009

The first very Ignite Toronto was held last Tuesday, August 25th, and it was an absolute blast. There were great speakers and even better cupcakes. Mark did his Ignite presentation on his favorite topic: gadgets. The very organized, uber efficient minds that orchestrated the event got around to putting up the videos really quickly, and here is Mark’s presentation:

Ignite is a specific format of presentation where each speaker is allowed exactly 20 seconds for each of the 20 slides, and the slides rotate automatically. Watch all the presentation from Ignite Toronto here: http://igniteto.com/.

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Office-warming party

July 29th, 2009

We had an informal gathering on Friday, July 24 at our studio office to bless the new space with friends and neighbors from the same floor in our building.  It was also a good opportunity for us to get some projects done and off the shelf, like, installing the projector, finishing up our ‘interactive ticker bar’ (which was on the shelf for a year!), putting together some left over LED parts, etc.

The spread for the evening

Interactive wall – showing Swarm, a project by David Bouchard, our studio mate
   

In lieu of ceremonial traditions, we got a candy-filled piñata and everyone took turn smashing it with a hammer.
   

Thanks to everyone who stopped by! We look forward to having more events in the upcoming future.

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Aesthetec has a new home

July 13th, 2009

After moving our gears, equipments and supplies around from New York City to Italy to Thailand to Canada, and moving offices around in Toronto a few times, Ann and Mark have finally, finally set up a permanent space to do Aesthetec work. The studio is located in the west side of downtown Toronto, in the old fashion district of Richmond and Spadina, with enough space for a projection wall, shop area, and a microwave (fancy!!).

We’re sharing the space with David Bouchard, a comrade in new media and interactive art, and we are very excited to be working with like-minded people in the same studio!

And because of all this, we’ve finally got our act together and launch this ‘news’ page on our site and getting all the social network ducks in a row. We’re even working on a newsletter! So you’ll be hearing more from us soon. By the way, have you seen our newest project at the Connecticut Science Center?

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