SaskTel 25

In summer 2014 we made 2 interactive experiences to tour with a travelling presentation celebrating SaskTel's 25th anniversary of proving cellphone service.

This video is showcasing our AR model display running on an iPad.




SaskTel Blog

Experience the Power to Grow Tour

This project was a massive AR undertaking of over a dozen AR presentations, all seen inside a giant dome that has been traveling around Saskatchewan since the beginning of July 2014. Lots of pictures of the tour can be found on flickr,

Created for SaskPower, this unusual project was a collaboration between Captive, Phoenix Group, Brown Communications, with the Talking Dog team creating the central augmented reality parts of the experience.

Here's a little movie showing the introductory sequence from the presentation, with AR, sound, and original music by Talking Dog:

Riderville Interactive Experience

Here at Talking Dog, we're excited about how the technologies we've been developing since 2009 are so useful for "live" experiences. A perfect example from not long ago is Riderville, the four-day party environment where as many as 6000 people at a time gathered to celebrate, as part of the lead-up to the Grey Cup football championship which was being played here in our home town of Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada.

We developed three different Live Interactions which were featured nightly at Riderville. Let's take a look:

1. Live Polling
In years past, being able to individually poll an audience and see the results posted in real time was an expensive proposition, since it required a specially-designed hardware setup. Nowadays, with a large majority in possession of a smartphone, we figured out a much more cost-effective solution that runs in a web browser. Want to try it out? Go to talkingdog.tv with your smartphone to place your vote right now. If you have a second device nearby, use it to view the results at talkingdog.tv/1/viewer.php .

You'll notice there are two buttons near the bottom left on this viewer screen: if you click on Recent, the results will be temporarily cleared. This means that if you are with a group of friends, each with their own smartphone, tablet, or whatever, everybody in the room can vote and you can see just the results of your voting. You can then click on the Totals button and see how everyone else who has participated in the poll since it was launched stacks up.

Finally, there are actually 11 questions in this poll, so for instance if you want to view the results of the second poll you have to change your viewer link to talkingdog.tv/2/viewer.php , and so on. Simple? You bet! But very flexible. Imagine a conference or a large meeting where the moderator is taking questions from the floor, a question is quickly typed in and everyone in the room can then use their smartphones to express their opinion. Or imagine a room where multiple screens are set up, each showing the results viewer for a different question, and visitors are able to stroll from screen to screen and use their smartphone to place their vote and see the results in real time.

For the Riderville experience, where most of the questions were trivia-related, we also posted the answers, which you were given a link to once you had answered all 11 questions. Inexpensive live polling is definitely something that could be used in a wide variety of settings, from just plain fun to very serious.

2. Real-time Animated Sound Meter
This is something you've seen a version of at sporting events for years - a cartoon depicting a sound meter is shown to the crowd, and fans are encouraged to cheer as loudly as possible. Wouldn't it be better, we thought, to create an animated display that actually responded to the sound of the crowd rather than just pretending to? That's what we built for Riderville. Here's a picture of our meters being used on the big screens at the event:

Those big screens were provided by our friends at IKS Media, who also created the opening animations for the sound meter, and our Whack-a-Mole game:

3. Riderville Whack-a-Mole
Using a kinect and a Mac Mini, we built this augmented reality whack-a-mole game, which was a popular attraction throughout the event. A player would simply stand out on the dance floor, wave their hands in the air, and see their on-screen "shadow" hitting moles as they popped up out of a football field. But they had to be careful - because occasionally team mascot Gainer the Gopher would pop his head out, and if you hit Gainer you'd lose points. We'll talk more about this game in our next entry, but in the meantime, stay augmented!

A direct link to the above video is at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a9lcaPP2w0k

Clandestine: Anomaly

Here's a direct link to the above video:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=svnVnYPc50g

Right now we're hard at work on the sound design and music for a game being created by a team of artists and programmers from across Canada under the leadership of Winnipeg's Zenfri Incorporated. It's called "Clandestine: Anomaly". We just came across the above video Zenfri put out last year that shows some of the Augmented Reality we helped create for advance promo of the game, which has already received some serious recognition: in October 2013, the project's first prototype was presented with the prize for “Best Mobile Augmented Reality Game” at the Metaio International Developer Competition out of Germany.

Speaking of Germany, here's a google-translated screen grab from an interview with Zenfri's co-founder Corey King, this appeared a few months ago in the German newspaper Weser Kurier. You can read more about the article in the Clandestine: Anomaly blog entry about this interview.

Corey King as the "King of Augmented Reality"? Congrats to Corey, those are quite the accolades!

"Create Your Mayo Clinic Health Experience"

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1z7jDY3sbrs

When US company GoConvergence was hired by The Mayo Clinic to supervise the creation of a new permanent installation at the Mall of America, they knew one of the elements they wanted to add was Augmented Reality (AR). They put out a call for proposals to the major players in this exciting new industry, and who did they hire? Talking Dog Studios, from Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada.

What is AR? Talking Dog president Rob Bryanton explains: “If you’ve ever watched a football game and seen that yellow down line superimposed on the field, then you’ve seen a form of Augmented Reality. That down line isn’t really there, but sophisticated technology superimposes it on the video to make it seem as if it’s real. Any time you see real-time information or graphics superimposed in a way that connects them to the world of what the camera or the user is seeing, that’s AR”.

 Create Your Mayo Clinic Health Experience is a permanent installation now open at The Mall of America. Amongst the various interactive displays throughout the installation encouraging healthy living, there are three kiosks which feature software designed by Talking Dog Studios in collaboration with Regina's Asmoteknologies Ltd. These kiosks invite visitors to interact with highly detailed animated 3D models of the heart, the head, and various joints. Users can rotate the models to see them from any side they choose, and labels identifying various parts of the model or providing interesting facts fly in and out as the models rotate.

The 3D models were developed in collaboration with the Mayo Clinic’s team of illustrators, and are both medically accurate and photo-realistic. Optimizing our software and these models so they would display at their full resolution and frame rate within the display was a unique challenge, and is one of the things that people find most exciting when they first experience these remarkable kiosks. This level of realism represents a major leap forward in Augmented Reality, and many hours of hard work by the Talking Dog team of programmers and designers, which include Rene Dufour-Contreras, Ryan Hill, plus Tony Mountjoy and Aaron Thompson of Asmotek.com.

For more information please contact Rob Bryanton at Talking Dog Studios, 306-790-4008.

47 Countries Playing Our New Game Within a Week!

SMPIA Announces Augmented Reality Game Results

SMPIA, in partnership with Saskatchewan's Talking Dog Studios is happy to announce that Trilight Entertainment is the winner of Multi-PlatFORUM - The Game, an augmented reality mobile experience launched at the Multi-PlatFORUM conference on April 14th in Regina. Playable on either Android phones or the iPhone, the game superimposed a constantly changing random selection of the logos of all the companies and associations participating in the Multi-PlatFORUM event onto the phone's camera view so that it appeared as if the logos are really floating in space around the player. Within 6 hours of launch the game was being played in 26 countries. To date, over 10,000 logos have been displayed in 47 countries around the world.

The contest finished at 8 am (CST) this morning. While players will continue to be able to play for fun, Trilight Entertainment of Regina, SK had collected 615 logos by contest close to claim the first prize Augmented Reality package worth $500 from Talking Dog Studios.

Talking Dog Studios president Rob Bryanton had this to say about the game: "When we saw that people all over the world were playing, it really opened up the possibility that the winner was going to be from the other side of the planet! But Trilight took the bull by the horns, they grabbed the lead early and managed to outwit their competition all week. Way to go Trilight, we're looking forward to seeing how you want to use your prize."

"We are excited to explore the potential of using Augmented Reality and Digital Media to compliment the Film projects we have in development, "said Trilight Entertainment's Shayne Putzlocher upon learning of his win, "and we had a lot of fun participating in the game".

SMPIA Digital Media Initiative Manager Nova Alberts was thrilled with the response to the game. "This was a wonderful way to demonstrate the speed and reach of digital media when you engage your audience. And I love that we were able to put Saskatchewan and Canadian logos in front of so many international players."

Just a reminder, the game can still be played by using the browser on your iPhone or Android phone to go to this link: http://www.bit.ly/multiplatforum. An added feature is that all companies and sponsors participating in the event will now have a fixed logo floating at their business location.

Hey We Made the Top 10 AR Projects by the Music Industry!

Thank you! You shouldn't have, no really...ok, ok we accept! First of all, we'd like to thank our mothers without whom this wouldn't have been possible...

Ori Inbar at Games Alfresco put together a list of the top 10 Augmented Reality projects created by the music industry...and lo and behold, we made the list! He names the top projects that he feels best showcase the combination of Augmented Reality and the music industry. Collaborations with artists like John Mayer, Rhianna, and Eminem all made the list, so we're stoked to be amongst such superstars (both in the music industry and AR development)! The top spot on the list went to Black Eyed Peas 360, which is a truly awesome AR project and well-deserved leader of the pack.

Our project, 10th Dimension Music Video for Rob Bryanton's Imagining the Tenth Dimension project, landed us at #5 on Ori's list.

You can create your own AR interactive music video in real time using two of the songs from the 10th Dimension project. Go to www.talkingdogstudios.com/10thdim to check it out!

This was actually one of our first AR projects that we attempted to create back in early 2009. Glad to see that it still is generating some interest! We enjoyed exploring the combination of music, user-controlled animation, and particle effects and would love to delve deeper into this area in the future. So if you have any projects in mind please contact us at ar@talkingdogstudios.com and we'll see what cool AR stuff we can imagine for you.

So thanks to Ori for the recognition of our project! Here's hoping me make some other top 10 lists (maybe top 10 AR companies with attractive developers....we can wish right?)

The Talking Dog AR Team

ScavengAR Hunt in the News!!!

The gang at Talking Dog have had their tails wagging in delight the last couple days thanks to our ScavengAR Hunt mobile game getting some press! We were on CTV Regina News at 6pm on Tuesday, October 5th and had an article in the Leader-Post on Wednesday, October 6th.

We wanted to let the people know that there are treasures (well maybe not everyone thinks a pickle is a treasure :p) waiting to be collected all around them in augmented reality. With every object they add to their collection, they can move up the leader board inching closer and closer to ruling the world of ScavengAR Hunt!

You would think that would be enough incentive to play, but we made it even better. For the good folks of Regina, we've talked before about the framed picture featuring Ron Lancaster and George Reed that you'll be able to see downtown and high above Mosaic Stadium while you're playing the game. In addition, right now there are coupons waiting to be discovered around town, from The Copper Kettle and K Family Kitchen. Once you find these coupons (which are also worth points, by the way) you can then show the coupon you collected on your iPhone or Android phone when you place your order and get a deal at the corresponding establishment. What? Did we just say you can get deals on food by playing ScavengAR Hunt? Yes, yes we did.

So thanks to CTV Regina and the Leader-Post for the shout out! We hope that people start racking up the points on ScavengAR Hunt or, at the very least, go out and get a deal on some delicious pizza!

Get Scavenging Regina!

The Talking Dog AR Team