play.fm blog

Did you ever walk through the streets, maybe as a tourist, passing a poster of a club night, thinking “sounds great, but who is this DJ? And where is
this club?”

Wouldn’t it be cool to use your smartphone to get instant access to the club’s location, an entrance ticket and to listen to the DJ’s mixes on Play.fm? You just have to point your phone at the poster and -voilà- the App adds interactive elements on the phone display.

For example a speaker icon playing music by the artist, or a camera icon, showing images of lasts weeks event. The “Get me there” icon gives several options to either open a map with the route to the venue, or call a taxi to the club.

We <3 Augmented Reality!

SmartReality meeting at the Play.fm HQ

There is no app for that, yet. Guess what, Play.fm started a research project to develop one!

In co-operation with the Institute for Computer Graphics and Vision at the Graz University of Technologie, semantic web experts STI International and seekda, e-commerce specialists in tourism,  we’re working on the realization of this idea.
We call it ‘SmartReality’.

working hard...

We’ll keep you posted about the first prototype coming in fall!
What do you guys think about this idea?

* UPDATE Aug 27, 2011 *

Please fill out the survey on how you use event posters.

English: http://is.gd/28mTLo
German: http://is.gd/wQGg8j

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About the partners:

STI

• The STI association was founded in 2007 for semantic technology co-operation as well as project management
• The Consulting and Research GmbH is fully owned by the association and offers commercial services in training, event organization, consultancy and commercialisation of research results. It also pursues research work to integrate semantic technology into emerging fields such as mobile and media applications, with the goal of both developing semantics-based services and tools with commercial value, as well as strengthening its capacity to offer consultancy and technology advice (roadmapping, white papers) around semantic solutions for these emerging fields.
• New mobile and media applications are a specific focus of the research.

TU Graz

• The Institute of Computer Graphics and Vision (ICG) at Graz University of Technology is the only Austrian academic group with the ability to address both computer vision and computer graphics and is carefully nurturing a culture of digital visual information processing to resolve the artificial boundaries between computer graphics and computer vision.
• The research group of Prof. Reitmayr and Prof. Schmalstieg focuses on computer graphics and interactive systems. Studierstube, developed in the group, is one of the worlds advanced and widely used augmented reality software platforms and successfully used in a large number of projects.

seekda

• seekda is a spin-off of the Semantic Technology Institute (STI) Innsbruck, University of Innsbruck.
• The company has developed a Web service search engine based on focused crawling and is one of the technological leaders in the Web Service and Semantic Web domains.
• seekda operates in the e-commerce domain, providing services that range from the preparation of Web Services for e-commerce, their integration in existing services and applications, as well as the bundling to new and more capacious services.