Where the Buffalo Roam

If you saw our blog post about using historical re-creations you may be wanting to try our "Where the Buffalo Roam" layer we've created for the mobile phone augmented reality browser Layar. Today we published our project for everyone to enjoy.

To check out our new augmented reality buffalo herd make sure you have Layar installed on your iPhone / Android phone. Go to the "search" tab and look for "buffalo roam". When our layer appears click on the blue arrow button to launch, and be whisked away to a field of AR buffalo. You will also have the option to listen to some buffalo roaming which can be selected or ignored.

Currently our herd of buffalo should surround you wherever you are. We will be publishing more place specific layers in the future. Stay tuned.

On a distantly related note, did you know this is a grammatically correct sentence in the English language?

Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo.

Click here to read about this very curious looking sentence.

And enjoy the buffalo!

The Talking Dog AR team.

AR and Historical Re-creations

The above picture comes from the wikipedia article on Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada. The picture is entitled "young man poses with huge pile of buffalo bones ready to be shipped".

Here at Talking Dog Studios in our on-going exploration of augmented reality, we've started investigating the world of mobile AR. The Layar app for iPhone and Google Android phones seemed to be the most obvious place to start. We have been thinking about AR, tourism and places of historical interest ever since we made our AR project for Saskatchewan Tourism so it seemed logical to take that a little further.

We started out by trying to put simple "Points of Interest" (POI) in our parking lot here at Talking Dog. We thought it would also be interesting to explore Saskatchewan's history of buffalo herds: the original name for the city we live in was "Pile of Bones", and it got its name from the huge piles of bones that were left behind by the buffalo hunters in the area.

So, through a little tinkering we built ourselves a herd of buffalo taking up all of our parking spots. This picture is of 100 virtual buffalo as seen from google maps (currently this is not publicly visible).

(Incidentally, bison is the more correct term for these animals, but buffalo still tends to be what people around here say in conversation).

At Talking Dog we understand the importance of sound to create a believable experience. To add to the realism we also allowed for the sound of a herd to be triggered when you get within a certain distance.

Next, we placed our herd of 3d buffalo models we had created in a field adjacent to Regina's Royal Saskatchewan Museum.


We're very excited by the possibilities of historical re-creations using mobile devices, and this seems like a good start. At present our herd of buffalo can only be seen if you come to the open space south east of the Royal Saskatchewan Museum here in Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada.

This project should be published relatively soon, and we'll be sure to spread the word when we have it up. As always, follow us on twitter for more up to the minute updates on what's going on in AR.

Here's to our augmented future!

The Talking Dog AR team.