Come early ahead of the seminar for a preview of juried projects heading to the ACCelerate Creativity and Innovation Festival taking place Oct. 13-15, 2017, at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History in Washington, DC.

Sept. 14 ACCelerate Project: Electrocet
The Electrocet project started with the idea that you shouldn't have to buy a sports car or an electric vehicle or a commuter car - there should be a car that can excel in all driving scenarios, just by selecting the right drive mode.

Seminar Topic Abstract:

At Georgia Tech, we started the Argon project back in 2009 to explore the idea of integrating Augmented Reality (AR) technology into mobile web browsers, and letting web developers create AR experiences without the need to build and ship mobile applications.  This past September, we shipped Argon4, the fourth version of the Argon AR-enabled web browser for iOS, and open-sourced the argon.js framework at https://argonjs.io. The design of Argon4 and argon.js is based on a set of principles we have developed to support the creation and delivery of AR experiences in a heterogeneous ecosystem of interaction and display devices and AR sensing technologies.  Argon’s design is aimed at allowing users to run multiple independently authored AR experiences at once, using different representations of reality as the backdrop for these applications, putting the user in control of when and how they interact with AR content.  

At Mozilla, we led the design and development of WebVR over the past few years, and last month shipped the first implementation of WebVR 1.1 in Firefox.  We are building on our experience with WebVR and what I've learned in the Argon project to expand the design of WebVR to include the breadth of Mixed, Augmented and Virtual Reality. 

We are developing these ideas as WebXR, an open-source framework for cross platform, “reality based” experiences, that also serves as a proposal for doing web-based MR. This work is in the experimental stage, being done in the Emerging Technologies group as part of a larger set of projects aimed at making the Web the ideal platform for MR experiences large and small.  We want to bring the best characteristics of the Web to these new 3D paradigms, making AR, VR and MR open and accessible to all, not just as consumers but as creators as well.

Speaker Bio:

Blair MacIntyre is a Principal Research Scientist at Mozilla and a Professor in the School of Interactive Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology, where he has directed the Augmented Environments Lab since 1999. His research focuses on developing the potential of augmented reality as a novel technology and new medium for games, entertainment, education and work. Since 2008 he has directed the Argon project to explore the potential of the web as a platform for Augmented Reality, and is currently working on Mixed Reality in the Emerging Technologies group at Mozilla to bring this vision of Web-based AR to life.  He has published more than 100 research papers, is actively involved with industry as a consultant and speaks regularly about augmented reality, games and mobile technology.