Last week I got the chance to attend the AR Dev Camp in Zurich, Switzerland. A bunch of AR-related people – developers, business developers and VCs among others – came together in bright sunshine to meet at the IBM building in Zurich.
Martin Lechner
The event started with two quick introductions from IBM and Christine Perey, the organizer of the event (thanks again Christine!), followed by the logistic questions how to structure the sessions so that everybody can attend all sessions he or she wanted to take, as we needed to have some sessions simultanously.
Martin Lechner, CTO Mobilizy
The first session was all about User Experience in AR applications. Very well prepared though, every group had to select one of some predefined personas and find out how AR could help this persona in everyday life – from school boys and party girls to nurses, policemen and disabled people. Some interesting ideas came up how people can benefit from AR in their personal and professional life – definitely a mind opener!
The next session was about how to make money out of AR, followed by the CTO of Kooaba talking about Image Recognition in AR apps – very interesting from a technical perspective.
Martin "in action"
Finally, the last session in the event was mine. At first I introduced ARML to the attendees and asked them to think of how ARML might be extended to support Image Recognition as well. Nice discussion, the outcome – very briefly – was that standardizing the response from an Image Recognition process is not hard and could fit well into the ARML format, however, standardizing Image Recognition itself is not really feasible, as many algorithms co-exist and deliver different results depending on the properties of the image. The discussion about ARML took longer than expected from my side, so I had to keep the discussion about the Wikitude API rather briefly. Basically, the attendees knew already about the Wikitude API (which is great!) or were very interested in developing AR applications with the API. Let’s see how many applications will make it to a release!
In the evening, we met again at the University of Zurich for a Mobile Monday and showcased (with yellow sashes :-) ) our applications to lots and lots of people on the street. Finally we went to a nice bar and did some networking. In general, a great event with great people talking about a great topic! Thanks again Christine for the expertly organized event, and looking forward to participate in upcoming events as well!
Find more pics here.