Ran across this short article in Information Week (The Biggest Capital Asset: IoT & Augmented Reality) and while it’s short and high level, it is a nice summary of the obvious way IoT plus AR would benefit capital intensive industries (i.e., industrials with a huge investment in expensive machines).

So long, farewell, auf Wiedersehen, goodbyeIf you haven’t seen The Sound of Music, you should. .

In a post on the Mozilla MR Blog⊕
A-Painter XR AR interface, I talked about the responsive AR/VR interface we created for a WebXR version of A-Painter, called A-Painter XR. In that post, I mentioned that we started working on this app while envisioning the ability to create and share “AR Graffiti” out in the world.

⊕
David Lebovitz’s Pasta recipe. Last year, I posted some musings on the question “What is an MR Blog?”. Perhaps this question would be better phrased as “what will the equivalent of the common blog be for MR content?”, since “blog” is really just a placeholder for “non-trivial collection of content that lots of people can create and share”.

Today, when you visit a web page that contains WebVR content, the page itself presents an interface to let the user transition into VR. For example, a page on sketchfab.com contains a small image of a VR display in the toolbar overlaid on the 3D scene (the third icon in from the right):

How do I make this blog usable and useful in MR? What does this even mean? It might seem a silly question, but it’s actually a serious one. I’ve been working on web-based AR for quite some time ⊕I started doing web-based AR as part of the Argon project at Georgia Tech in 2010, and now work on WebXR at Mozilla. , and one of the things that I’ve long wondered about is what are “the things” people will do with AR and VR on the web.

⊕The source for the app, our WebXR Viewer, is open on github, let me know if you see any issues. I tweeted a complaint that Apple was taking too long (two weeks and counting!) to approve an app I’d submitted, and a friend replied:

Interesting article in Venture Beat that gets at the heart of why WebVR is such a powerful concept (old, just stumbled across it again). Zeros in on the lack of friction and ease of creating simple cross-platform experiences, but goes beyond that to illustrate a number of situations and user experiences that rely on the underlying nature of the web.

⊕I decided to deal with it for a practical reason: I have been giving presentation about our WebAR work using the web, combining the reveal.js web presentation package with our argon.js AR web framework, and running the presentation (with embedded AR demos) in our Argon4 AR-capable mobile web browser. When presenting, it’s best to run the server locally, to avoid being at the mercy of whatever net connection is available at a conference, but to access the web location API, websites must be hosted securely. And, while invalid certficate warnings are annoying, Argon4 currently does not work with invalid certficates at all. After running into problems with a very slow conference network last week, I decided to fix this. In the category of “technical things that are mildly annoying, but I never get around to fixing”, the inability to use https:// with a valid SSL certficate when doing local webdev on my laptop is way up there. Or, was.

As part of GoogleIO this past week, Google released some sample code on github for a little demo that exposes Tango’s sensing into Chromium.