A few days back, I shared with you a new AR assisted experience LEGO put out for kids and grownups to play along this holidays season, today I want you to explore a more of a group-oriented, public interactive experience.

Recently, National Geographic peered up with London studio Appshaker to create a new way for people to interact and discover content from the network's collection of amazing footage.

In order to do so, appshaker came out with a public AR experience that let thousands of people to interact with everything from a T-Rex to Dolphins swiming around you to even a playfull cheetah.

Take a look yourself in the video above. Look at how, both the people that step up to the markers and the people around the mall experience the display. It is in showcases like this that not only brands get something to show for but the society gets the chance to start seeing what the future is going to look like. It prepare themselves for what's around the corner and gives creatives new grounds to explore.

Immagine what would happen if you add a kinect camera into the mix, if you have smart enough movements into the characters that could let people interact with the animals like if they were there, imagine what if you could dress the people with new clothes and take them into a new journey.

Academics: get the ball going, take your research outside, it's time to take all of those experiences out of the lab and into the world!!

This morning Helguita sent me a link to the new Lego Life of George experience and got to say it made me smile and more than that it put me mind to fly.

This hybrid game combines the physical task of assembling legos with that of a virtual-checking using an Augmented Reality app for the iPhone.

Wit this app you can go against the clock with the models the app suggests, while you can also start building your own stages as well, saving them, sharing them and exploring new ones.

Now imagine if we could take this experience and apply it to more complex tasks, verification processes in real time and with the tools with have at hand today.

I think we are living in exciting times of innovation and as I noted yesterday on my Google Profile, it is in the exploration of this new experiences, the key eye to forward thinking and the inherent value for the aesthetics in today's toys that we are setting foundations for a creative society that will move the needle forward in very revolutionary ways in just a few years.

sometimes you have to test stuff yourself just to see how grant it is... this has happened to me in a couple of ocacions before: when I got my first iphone, when I got my first retina-enabled iPod touch and now I can add a third... and it's from Microsoft!

The Photosynth App just works as advertized, the app sports Microsoft's Metro look and feel that, to say the least, it feels fresh on a device that is all but different (is it that a good thing?!) but that's just icyng on the cake... you have to tap start and just go flashing away those pictures... it's amazing!

Mobile photography really won't be the same after you test this app.

Kudos to Blaise and his team of researchers... this trully is a step closer to the future!

PS. Care to know where did all this came from? then check out Blaise demoing Seadragon and Photosynth and the future of Augmented Reality Maps at TED and then follow on dreaming!

Update: better yet... skip those videos and watch them later and just jump straight to Blaise's account of the app experience.

As the year comes slowly to its end, the pase of work also comes slowly into the holidays and even though this should be a time to relax and meditate, we geeks always come up with some free time and look out for something new to put in our toolbox, well look for it no more and enter ONTWIK.

Ontwik aims to provide the web community with a hight quality, latest, and best web development lectures and conferences from the best web developers and designers.

I don't know how long has this website been up for... but for what I can see there are quite a few jewels hidden inside.

So don't waste time looking around, now you know what to do with those free hours!

Happy holidays everyone!

I've blogged about several AR projects before, including the SLARToolkit, a Silverlight port of the now famous ARToolkit.

When SLARToolkit came out I thought it was great and a natural fit for the capabilities that Silverlight 4 was enabling back then... now, fast forward to November 2010 and we finally have a true competitive mobile OS supporting Silverlight out of the box... but! there is catch, the framework is crippled with a few key limitations... or is it?

Today I want you to take a look at what my friend Kevin Marshall put together thru some of his tea-leaf-reading skills... the video above is of his WP7 phone running the SLARToolkit with not too many problems... this is a hack, and I don't think it's encouraged by anybody in Redmond, but clever nonetheless.

This small app is enabled thanks to the interop hack found a few days back so don't expect to see similar implementations in any comercial app any time soon... but it's good to know it's possible.

Be sure to follow Kevin on twitter as he is a true wizard of Silverlight and, without knowing, you might have been experiences some of his work already on your WP7 phone.

Cheers for this dude and again... happy birthday!

In just a few weeks time I'll be attending the ISMAR Conference 2010 here in Korea and I'm exited!

My research center is part of the organizer committee and I'm helping one of the PI's here to co-organize one of preliminary workshops along with Christine Perey, of Perey Research Consulting.

The video above is just one of the cool implementations Augmented Reality is seeing in the last months and with the power of mobile architectures, matching that of our computers just a few years ago, the limit of possibilities is just growing exponentially.

One of coolest parts of this conference for us is that we will be showcasing Discovr Places along with our first public client, Discovr Korea, for the first time in it's full and, even though it's not an specific implementation of AR, we hope to see a few AR partnership opportunities coming out as aftermath.

So stay tuned, watch the video above and keep happy!