Until recently the Germans called Kunduz in the northeast of Afghanistan a spa (“Bad Kunduz”). The war was not called a war and partying in the camp common. Much has changed after two petrol road tankers had been hijacked by Taliban insurgents in Ramadan, the Muslim holy month of fasting. It was Thursday September 3, a weekend, and German Colonel Georg Klein and his staff sergeant (code name “Red Baron”) had ordered American F15 Strike Eagles  to bombard the fuel tankers which had got stuck in a sand bank of the Kunduz River. They dropped two 500 lb bombs and up to 142 people, including some 30 civilians, died in an inferno.

What has been always very disturbing was that the Sergeant had actually been asked by the pilots (code names “Dudes 15 and 16”) whether a “show of force” would be sufficient and whether the individuals seen in the vicinity of the fuel tanks comprised an “imminent threat.” The negative responses given by the “Red Baron”, however, led to the release of the two bombs at 1.50 am local time, Friday morning. A pretty graphic, so far classified, movie made by the pilots and showing the situation on the sand bank with numerous people around the fuel tanks and the subsequent blast had been published today by German leading tabloid BILD. It was also reported that severely injured minors had been transported to local hospitals.

Despite having immediately known about civilian casualties, former German Secretary of Defense Franz Josef Jung had insisted for several days months after the disaster that only Taliban had been killed and the call for the bombers justified. His successor in office, Baron Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg has fired today German Army’s Chief of Staff General Wolfgang Schneiderhan and Under-Secretary of State Peter Wichert.

Thus, pawns are being sacrificed, but Jung, who is presently Secretary of Labor in Angela Merkel’s new Cabinet, will certainly be dismissed soon as well, while his Colonel Klein is probably facing a lawsuit.

See also on this blog:

Mobile Phone?

While Americans commemorate the victims of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, Afghans mark an eight-year anniversary of their own: the death of Ahmad Shah Massoud, the “Lion of Panjshir”, who was assassinated on September 9, 2001. The anti-Soviet fighter and former defense minister’s legacy was celebrated with a ceremony in Kabul and observances across the country. I can’t help thinking that the timing could have worked out better for Hamid Karzai, who is currently contesting the results of an election against Massoud’s friend and adviser Dr. Abdullah.

More about that election in a second, but I wanted to note the death of another of Massoud’s old associates: journalist Sultan Munadi, who was once the ICRC’s liaison to Massoud’s Northern Alliance. Munadi was taken captive by the Taliban last Saturday while serving as a translator New York Times reporter Stephen Farrell, and killed (along with one British commando) in Wednesday’s raid that freed Farrell. Other Times reporters remember Munadi fondly here; one notes that the invariable media reference to him as a  “translator” is misleading, since he was an accomplished journalist in his own right. Munadi had previously left the Times to start his own radio station, and the tributes make him sound like exactly the kind of talented, energetic believer in a free press that Afghanistan desperately needs . The rescue that led to Munadi’s death was approved by the British foreign and defense secretaries on the news that the Taliban planned to transfer the two to Pakistan. That last article also has Farrell’s grim account of the captors’ treatment of Munadi, whom they taunted with the example of an Afghan translator who was beheaded by insurgents before the Western reporter he was accompanying went free; that history isn’t lost on other Afghan journalists, many of whom are furious that the raid was carried out–and doubly furious that Munadi’s body was apparently left at the scene for his family to collect.

The BBC quotes an Afghan public radio editor as calling the raid the ” most shocking event to date involving the international forces”; while his anger is understandable, that description seems especially hyperbolic in the wake of ISAF’s recent airstrike on two captured fuel trucks in Kunduz–the incident Farrell and Munadi were investigating–which killed 125 Afghans according to a NATO fact-finding team. The strike was ordered by a German colonel, Georg Klein, apparently out of fear that the tankers could be used in an attack on the Provincial Reconstruction Team or the police station; the decision was guided by footage from an American F-15 and information from an Afghan informant. The German military and Minister of Defense initially claimed that all those killed were insurgents, but now acknowledge that civilians were also killed–possibly civilians conscripted by the Taliban to help offload fuel from the trucks, which were stuck in a river. NATO’s investigation indicated two dozen civilian casualties; the official dispatched by Karzai claimed that 82 people had been killed, including 45 militants; Afghanistan Rights Monitor, an NGO, spoke of “60-70 non-combatants” killed. The Taliban also released their own list of 79 civilians they claim died in the blast.

The airstrike contravened the spirit, if not the letter, of General McChrystal’s new guidelines for ISAF operations, which mandate that airstrikes in residential areas be based on information from more than one informant; the tankers were not in a residential area, but were apparently close enough to one that the Taliban could fetch villagers. McChrystal seems to have learned some lessons about how to defuse the reaction to this kind of event, though; he recorded a video message for Afghan news organizations expressing his concern, and visited Kunduz to meet with local officials at the PRT base. According to Ahmad Nader Nadery of the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission, the rapid reaction has prevented the Taliban from turning the strike into a “populist cause”; indeed, the Afghan officials McChrystal met in Kunduz focused their criticism on ISAF’s percieved leniency with the insurgents–though it’s impossible to say if locals see things the same way.

Internationally and in Germany, though, the fallout is messy. As this Guardian op-ed points out, even if the strike was within McChrystal’s guidelines, several questions remain: If the tankers were stuck in a river, why did the Germans believe the tankers were an imminent danger to NATO troops? How could they have been so confident in the (night-vision) images from the F-15 to declare that everyone on the scene was an insurgent? Andrex Exum adds: “Why, one has a right to ask, did the Germans not deploy a QRF or Ground Assault Convoy to recover the fuel trucks when they were stolen?” McChrystal has questions of his own for Klein, whom he feels was too slow to get troops on the scene, allowing the Taliban to be first out with their version of events. Joshua Foust reminds us of a laundry list of the Bundeswehr’s failures in Afghanistan and comes to the harsh conclusion that Germany “is consistently undermining the allied tasks in Afghanistan and should either reevaluate or withdraw”.

In Germany, the political repercussions are even more dramatic. The German public is heavily opposed (about 3-to-1) to the war, but mainly seems to object to the actual fighting–not the deployment of German troops for development or peacekeeping, say. Germany, of course, does not actually consider itself at war; hence the announcement this week that German prosecutors are considering opening a homicide investigation into the airstrike. Insofar as this incident reminds voters what war involves, it puts Chancellor Merkel and her allies on the defensive in advance of this month’s elections. It seems that only the far-left parties are attempting to capitalize on that discontent, though; in this sense, Merkel is fortunate to have her foreign minister as her main opponent. Thomas Rid notes, however, that whoever forms a government will need broad support to reauthorize Germany’s ISAF mandate by December 15, and suggests that McChrystal “have a chat with his political advisors” about not publicly embarrassing his ally.

The same tension between avoiding political awkwardness and honestly assessing the situation in Afghanistan is also evident in the Western reaction to the recent elections. The present situation–a narrow “win” for Karzai (presently with 54.1% of the vote) marred by massive and credible allegations of fraud and ballot-stuffing–is the worst possible scenario for Karzai’s international allies. Domestically, the Electoral Complaints Commission and the Independent Electoral Commission tangled over the results, with the IEC reversing a decision to employ certain electoral safeguards when it looked like those safeguards would keep Karzai below 50%, and the ECC ordering a recount of “ballot boxes where turnout was exceptionally high or where one candidate won 95 percent or more of votes at polling stations that had at least 100 ballots cast”. The ECC also invalidated ballots from several polling stations in Ghazni and Kandahar, as well as ALL ballots from Paktika. (The IEC is not allowed to certify the election until the ECC’s work is done; the IEC is a government body, while the ECC is UN-funded and chaired by a Canadian, Grant Kippen.) But the IEC is apparently dragging its feet, since it announced a new round of results only hours after the ECC’s recount order–blaming a poor Dari-to-English translation of the ECC’s order!

So how have Western governments reacted? Well, the main strategy has been to make noises about not wanting to pass judgment until results are official, but that hasn’t stopped politicians from floating trial balloons. British Foreign Minister David Miliband, for example, spoke of a “consensus administration”, generally interpreted to mean a unity government. That’s an idea no Western government is likely to endorse explicitly, especially after Afghanistan’s Foreign Ministry got into a spat with Iranian ambassador Fadd Hossein Maleki over his suggestion that a coalition government will be necessary. David Cameron, on the other hand, was less circumspect than Miliband, criticizing the election’s “naked corruption”. Karzai’s opponents at home are growing bolder as well, with one endorser of Dr. Abdullah, Balkh governor Atta Mohammad Nur, accusing the government of distributing weapons to supporters and warning of possible violence. (This article from The Times of London contains the disturbing tidbit that “the price of Kalashnikovs has almost doubled in recent weeks”.) Karzai was philosophical, shall we say, about the election in a recent interview with Le Figaro: “Alas, it [fraud] is inevitable in a nascent democracy.”

As Jim Hoagland argues, massive fraud allegations are doubly troubling–they not only sap the government’s legitimacy, they indicate that the tribal leaders making the allegations likely feel the need to appease the Taliban by making it clear that their areas are not, in fact, unanimously behind Karzai. So how can legitimacy be salvaged and the tide turned? In the New York Times, Jon Krakauer and Ansar Rahel suggest that the foreign institution of presidential elections should be replaced with the Afghan tradition of a loya jirga at which a consensus decision would be reached. (I’m skeptical of both claims–that the elections were seen by Afghans as illegitimately Western, as opposed to simply fraudulent, and that a loya jirga would be recognized by all as an authentic and indigenous solution.) Spencer Ackerman wonders aloud if NATO wouldn’t be better off circumventing Karzai as much as possible and delivering aid and services from the ground up. Andrew Exum grimly notes that “we cannot be successful in [a counterinsurgency campaign] if the host nation government is seen as increasingly illegitimate”, but maintains that he doesn’t see withdrawal as an option–and so worries that the elections will let “the chorus for withdrawal will grow louder”. Matthew Yglesias, increasingly skeptical of our commitment to Afghanistan, suggests that we recognize our leverage over Karzai–who, for all his bluster about the U.S. “manipulating” him, needs our presence–and allow him and Dr. Abdullah to work out a solution between them rather than “micro-managing Afghan politics”.

Again, many suggestions but few comprehensive solutions after an election that everyone agrees left Western interests–not to mention Afghanistan–in a much worse position.

A last note: as a tribute to Sultan Munadi, I wanted to mark a rare piece of good news for journalists out of Afghanistan. Parwiz Kambaksh, a journalism student who was arrested for distributing an article questioning Islam’s treatment of women, was pardoned by President Karzai and has been freed. Kambaksh had been sentenced to 20 years in jail and has since left the country to avoid reprisals.

[Follow-up to: "Gates Open to Troop Increase in Afghanistan On Top of Obama Surge as More Civilians Die and Most Americans Oppose the Occupation"]

Of the 125 NATO officials are estimating in the total death toll, Afghan officials are saying that at least 70 civilians were killed in the U.S.-led NATO airstrike nearby the city of Kunduz.

The September 4 airstrike at 2:30 AM was first said to have killed 50 insurgents—according to the German military commander overseeing troops in the province. The early death toll was tallied at 90—according to Kunduz Gov. Mohammad Omar in Frank Jordans’ initial report at the AP (via AntiWar.com)—putting the civilian death toll at 40, at that time. Friday, The New York Times (NYT) reported:

A senior NATO official who had watched aerial surveillance video of the attack site said the Germans who ordered the strike “had every reason to believe what they were looking at was groups of insurgents offloading tankers,” a process that went on for several hours.

The official said that the nearest villages were two miles away and that the authorities “don’t know yet” whether the attack violated the rules governing the use of airstrikes tightened this summer by General McChrystal.

According to the new rules, airstrikes are, in most cases, allowed only to prevent American and other coalition troops from being overrun by enemy fighters. Even in the case of active firefights with Taliban forces, airstrikes are to be limited if the combat is taking place in populated areas.

From initial accounts given by NATO and Afghan officials, it was not clear whether this strike met those conditions, regardless of whether the majority of the dead were insurgents or civilians.

Today, Rajiv Chandrasekaran at The Washington Post reports that a NATO fact-finding mission has estimated the total death toll at 125, including “at least two dozen of whom—but perhaps many more—were not insurgents”. The AP reports (via the NYT) that local officials are now estimating that civilian toll over 70, staying consistent with the German military’s early assessment of 50 insurgents killed in the attack:

The deputy United Nations representative to Afghanistan, Peter W. Galbraith, said Saturday that he was “very concerned” about the strike. “Steps must also be taken to examine what happened and why an airstrike was employed in circumstances where it was hard to determine with certainty that civilians were not present,” he said.

General McChrystal discussed the strike with President Hamid Karzai and later told senior commanders that “we need to know what we are hitting,” an aide said, speaking on condition of anonymity under command policy….

The strike’s toll remained unclear on Saturday. Germany said that 57 fighters were killed and that no civilians were believed to have been in the area at the time, based on surveillance aircraft. But NATO’s secretary general, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, acknowledged that some civilians may have died.

The local governor, Mohammad Omar, said 72 people were killed and 15 wounded. He said about 30 of the dead were insurgents. The rest were probably fighters or relatives, he said.

M. Karim Faiez and Laura King at the Los Angeles Times add:

Dozens of villagers suffered serious burns in the massive fireball ignited when the tankers were hit, they said….

In the initial hours after Friday’s strike in Kunduz, Western military officials expressed confidence that nearly all those killed were insurgents.

But later reports trickling in from the scene painted a grim picture of impoverished villagers being engulfed by the explosion while trying to siphon fuel from the stranded tankers….

After the hijacking, the trucks were tracked via aerial surveillance to a spot near the village of Omar Khel, where they became stuck when the hijackers tried to drive across a riverbed. Western military officials said they believed there were no civilians in the area, a crucial precondition for airstrikes under the new tactical directive issued by McChrystal soon after he took command.

Gen. McChrystal’s focus on the “need to know what”—at who—airstrikes “are hitting” and Mr. Galbraith’s ‘concern’ comes from the report that this particular airstrike was executed based one sole informant asserting to intelligence that only insurgents were in the strike zone, according to German officers. Mr. Chandrasekaran reports, “[T]he target appeared to be far less clear-cut than it had to the Germans.”:

An Afghan informant was on the phone with an intelligence officer at the center, however, insisting that everybody at the site was an insurgent, according to an account that German officers here provided to NATO officials.

Based largely on that informant’s assessment, the commander ordered a 500-pound, satellite-guided bomb to be dropped on each truck early Friday. The vehicles exploded in a fireball that lit up the night sky for miles, incinerating many of those standing nearby….

None of the survivors and the relatives dispute that some Taliban fighters were at the scene. But just how many remains unclear, as does the number of civilians. And because many of the bodies were burned beyond recognition, and others were buried in the hours after the explosion, it may be impossible to ascertain.

The decision to bomb the tankers based largely on a single human intelligence source appears to violate the spirit of a tactical directive aimed at reducing civilian casualties that was recently issued by U.S. Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the new commander of the NATO mission in Afghanistan. The directive states that NATO forces cannot bomb residential buildings based on a sole source of information and that troops must establish a “pattern of life” to ensure that no civilians are in the target area. Although the directive does not apply to airstrikes in the open, NATO officials said it is McChrystal’s intent for those standards to apply to all uses of air power, except when troops are in imminent danger….

[German commander, Col. Georg Klein] told the team, led by British Air Commodore Paddy Teakle, the NATO mission’s director of air operations, that he had asked a U.S. B-1B bomber flying over northern Afghanistan to search for two fuel trucks that had been hijacked Thursday evening. The bomber located the trucks, which by then were stuck on a small island in the middle of the Kunduz River, shortly after midnight Friday. The B-1 crew reported seeing rocket-propelled grenades and small arms among some of the people at the site, Klein said….

Twenty minutes later, two F-15E Strike Eagles arrived. A video camera pod beamed live images to Klein’s command center. He and his troops could see the trucks — and scores of people around them.

His intelligence chief had spoken to an Afghan source who insisted that everyone at the site was an insurgent. The description of the scene the source provided was similar to what Klein was seeing beamed from the F-15….

But there was no way to tell whether the dots on the screen were insurgents, as the source maintained.

“We heard there was a tanker and everyone was going to collect free fuel, so I went with them,” said Mohammed Shafiullah, the 10-year-old with the leg wound. He rode a donkey from his village and took in the scene from the western riverbank.

He probably would not have been alive had the airstrike coordinator at Klein’s command center not rejected the F-15 pilot’s recommendation to use 2,000-pound bombs on the trucks, which would have created far wider devastation. Instead, the coordinator demanded that 500-pound GBU-38 bombs be used.

Klein ordered the strike about 2:30 a.m. Two minutes later, the bombs had hit their targets.

Inside the command center, the screen showed a huge mushroom cloud enveloping the island. A few black dots — survivors — could be seen scurrying away. But most of the 100 or so dots that had been on the screen were gone….

“Everyone was panicked,” said Mirajuddin, the man who lost six cousins. “It was a horrible night.”

Instead of sending troops to the scene for an assessment of casualties — as McChrystal’s directive requires — the Germans waited until morning to send an unmanned aircraft over the site to take photographs. The first German troops did not arrive at the scene until noon Friday. By then, all the bodies had been removed.

Mirajuddin said he and his relatives found the bodies of only three of his cousins. He buried them that morning in the same grave, he said.

“News reports covering today’s attack by the U.S. command southwest of Kunduz province show that the good intentions of NATO forces in Afghanistan are not sufficient,” Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) stated in a press release, Friday. “If we want to avoid killing innocent civilians, we must end the war.”

A letter sent to Apple Developer Relations.

Dear Apple,

We are a collection of augmented reality (AR) enthusiasts and professionals (from business and academia), who have been working on a multitude of AR apps for the iPhone. These apps are poised to change the way people interact with the real world.

But here is the rub: we are currently unable to publish these apps on the app store because the iPhone SDK lacks public APIs for manipulating live video.

We are asking Apple to provide a public API to access live video in real time, on the iPhone.
We will be happy to offer additional technical details.

The impact of augmented reality (AR) on our lives could be as significant as the introduction of the PC.
In 10 years, we believe augmented reality will change the way everyone experiences travel, design, training, personal productivity, health care, entertainment, games, art, and advertising (videos).

Looking back just a few years, AR pioneers had to hack a slew of components into ridiculously large backpacks and HUDs, and be confined to rigged environments. Nowadays, it comes in friendly, affordable packages and the iPhone is one of the first devices to have it all – except for a public API.

The battle to determine the winning device has already begun; a public API to access live video will give the iPhone a lucrative ticket to compete.
We believe Apple has a window of opportunity of about 3 months before developers start looking elsewhere. If Apple decides to publish the API in that time frame – in the next 10 years, everyone might be using the iPhone as the preferred device to interact with the real world.

Here is how augmented reality could open up new opportunities for the iPhone this year:

Arf (Georgia Tech)

a virtual pet you take anywhere

ARghhhh (Georgia Tech)

first person table-top action game

Sekai Camera (Tonchidot)

AirTag the real world

Kweekies (int13)

a portal to creatures in a parallel world

Layar (SPRXmobile)

Browse the world with an AR browser – Details

Artoolkit for the iPhone (Artoolworks)

the most popular AR kit now on the iPhone

StudierStube ES (Imagination, Graz TU)

the only AR engine designed for mobile devices, now on iPhone – Details

PTAM on the iPhone (Oxford University)

next generation AR tracking with no markers or images

Wikitude (Mobilizy)

a travel guide that “tells you what you see”

Virtual Santa (Metaio)

interactive Christmas application using the augmented reality

Augmented Reality Sightseeing (Fraunhofer IGD)

Historic photographs overlaid on your field of view while strolling in a street

These are apps that are practically ready to go. There is a whole bunch of apps and games that are just waiting for the API to be available.

…And Apple, we know you can’t share your plans…so please surprise us soon!

Many many thanks for your consideration -
Sincerely,

Signed:
Michael Gervautz – Managing Director Imagination GesmbH
Robert Rice – CEO Neogence
Georg Klein – PhD PTAM creator from Oxford University
Stephane Cocquereaumont -  President & Lead Developer Int13 (Kweekies)
Maarten Lens-FitzGerald – Founder & Partner SPRXmobile, developer of Layar
Ori Inbar – Author of GamesAlfresco.com and CEO and founder – Ogmento (formerly Pookatak Games)
Philippe Breuss – Lead developer, Mobilizy
Philip R. Lamb – CTO, Artoolworks
Noora Guldemond – Metaio
Takahito Iguchi – CEO, Tonchidot
Blair MacIntyre – Associate Professor, Georgia Institute of Technology

Bruno Uzzan – CEO, Total Immersion
Michael Zoellner – Fraunhofer IGD
Andrea Carignano – CEO,  Seac02

If you are developing an AR app for the iPhone and wish to join this effort – just let us know.

I lördags predikade Georg Klein, 84 år ung, i Stora Gogan.

Tror att de flesta av oss som var där njöt av hans lågmälda men explosivt intensiva talekonst.

Georg snackade om indentitet, kulturella skillnader mellan Ungern, Sverige och Israel och att behöva fly från sitt hemland.

Georg som är en mästare på att fånga stora sammanhang i några ord sa bland annat att “Moder Svea tog emot oss flyktingar med öppna armar. Men hon omfamnade oss aldrig.”

Väl beskrivet.

Växlade några ord med mannen efter predikan och det visar sig att cancerforskaren har kvar sitt rum på KI och jobbar där – håll i dig nu – sju dagar i veckan.

Det visade sig att annat krutpaket, fotografen Lennart Nilsson, har ett rum i samma korridor som Gerog och även Lennart jobbar dygnet runt.

Vad än gubbarna går på  så skulle jag vilja beställa detsamma.

Nu har du också chansen att läsa Georgs kloka och vackra tankar.

Predikan hittar du på länkan nedan:

predikan2

Maceij Zaremba skriver intressant i DN om att det är svårt att bli svensk. Läs artikeln här.

Dans l’inquiétante et tortueuse Libidissi, Spaik traîne son corps fatigué de son appartement dans le quartier des papetiers où il vit avec Lieschen, une gamine orpheline, au hammam où il trouve des boys complaisants et une certaine forme de repos, le long des boulevards aux noms désespérément ironiques (Boulevard de la Liberté-de-la-Presse, de la Liberté-d’Opinion). Il avale au hasard des poignées de pilules multicolores, qu’il achète au distributeur, dans la salle d’attente du docteur – probablement pour combattre la terrible maladie de mau. Et il guette l’arrivée de son remplaçant: celui qui devra l’éliminer avant de prendre sa place. Ce que fait Spaik à Libidissi, ce n’est pas très clair. Le plus probable est que les services secrets de son pays l’y ont envoyé en tant qu’informateur. Ce qui est certain, c’est que tout en continuant à envoyer ses étonnants rapports, Spaik leur a échappé: ses employeurs ignorent où il habite, pas plus qu’ils ne connaissent l’existence du très mystérieux correspondant qui lui envoie des messages par une vieille ligne désaffectée du service des pneumatiques.

En réalité, deux tueurs sont chargés de l’éliminer. Leur route et celle de Spaik ne cessent de se croiser, les rapprochant toujours davantage, dans les méandres dangereux de Libidissi où les fanatiques religieux préparent l’anniversaire de la mort du Grand Gahis.

Ainsi que le suggère le titre, le personnage principal du roman n’est aucun des hommes fantomatiques qui se pourchassent, mais la ville, Libidissi, que l’auteur décrit en images frappantes: les vieilles maisons d’argile bleue, le ghetto interdit aux étrangers, les bateaux sur le fleuve victimes d’attentats, le Naked Truth Club ainsi nommé en référence à un aphorisme du Grand Gahis, les rues sillonnées par les taxis et les scooters. Images uchroniques d’une capitale d’Europe centrale, encore marquée par son passé colonial et par la révolution religieuse des Gahistes. Car à mon sens Libidissi relève finalement au moins autant de la science-fiction, ou du moins de la transfiction, que du polar. Et de ce point de vue, c’est une vraie réussite.

Pour le reste, ai-je aimé? Pas vraiment. Le roman manque d’épaisseur, de personnages – même s’il est vrai que la montée de la tension est très bien construite, avec le nécessaire sens de la fatalité que je demande aux romans noirs. Mais Georg Klein, à jouer de toutes ces images et ces faux-semblants, à laisser planer le doute sur tout (Spaik est-il schyzophrène? pourquoi les tueurs ont-ils été envoyés à Libidissi à un moment aussi explosif? qui est Lieschen?), perd sa lectrice, l’enferme dans un labyrinthe sans sortie – ce qui n’a pas été sans me rappeler certain film de David Lynch. Et il est possible en effet qu’il y ait là un discret hommage, dont le nom d’un des personnages se ferait l’écho. Mais moi, je n’aime pas les œuvres de Lynch.

Top 10 AR milestones in 2008 was one of the most popular posts this year. What came out of it was even more gratifying: a multitude of reflections, impressions, and thoughts I received about your own AR moments, including some last minute finds.

Here is an anecdotal collection of your greatest AR moments in 2008:

1. The Most fundamental AR milestone in 2008

Oriel Bergig: During 2008 we have seen some major advances in the field of Augmented Reality. Porting AR technology to mobile devices and especially cellular phones creates an opportunity to reach millions of users. For several years, the biggest AR labs and companies have made huge steps in this direction. In 2008 these efforts have started to show results. Pose estimation has been upgraded with the StbTracker release in the end of 2007. Research focusing on better user experience, and in particular on making mobile AR technology accessible to people with no special training, is being conducted by the best minds of the HitLabNZ. During one of the top covered events of the year, CES2008, Intel’s CEO Paul Otellini demonstrated Total Immersion’s technology enabling mobile AR experiences such as urban guidance. To wrap-up, the 2008 most fundamental milestone would be: AR technology is closing up fast on the mass user market.

Charles Woodward: The greatest milestone? Commercial breakthroughs by Metaio and Total  Immersion.

Thomas Wrobel: Wikitude I think. Seems the first released, useful, AR software. Runner up to the AR Geisha doll…

2) The best AR device of the year

Oriel: Since 2008 would most be remembered for its advances in mobile AR technology, the AR device of the year is the mobile phone. Nokia has released the Navigator phone that includes a GPS and an accelerometer, which make a valuable addition. The N95 has been demonstrated as well in many more contexts as a good choice for AR applications.  The next AR device of the year would be the Nokia N97 and of course the iPhone with its huge global success. iPhone feets very well AR applications and a successful attempt to port ARToolKit to iPhone has already been made by ARToolWorks. Appealing applications are next to come but only after the iPhone OS has better support for real time video acquirement.

Charles: Best device? iPhone, and/or Nokia 6210…

Thomas: hmz…tricky. I personally think hardware is still rather lackluster, and I have had little experience with some of the most recently released stuff.
I guess probably the iPhone + G1 devices…while far from ideal, they are at least getting location-aware services, and “barcode scanning” style product information into public hands.

Eric Rice shares what gets him excited about a video comparing between PS2 Eyetoy and PS3 Eye.

3) Best AR Demo

Oriel: The best demo of 2008 is the demo that will be remembered by most people a decade from now. The demo that reached most of the people in the world is most likely Intel’s CEO Paul Otellini keynote talk during CES2008.

Charles: Haunted Book, Cherrer et al at ISMAR2008 – just beatiful!
(click Interaction on the left menu bar and then Haunted House.)

Thomas: LevelHead [by Julian Oliver], I think. Although this pet demo [ARf] is also nice;
(that may be because I want my own desuke though :p)

4) Person of the AR year

Charles: Georg Klein – leads the way in anything he touches [single handedly won ISMAR 2008 tracking competition]

Thomas: There’s been so much development by so many individuals and companies I don’t know one specific person.

5) The most significant AR deal of 2008

Charles: Beijing Olympics fake fireworks. About the viewers of the Olympics openning ceremony:”What they did not realise was that what they were watching was in fact computer graphics, meticulously created over a period of months and inserted into the coverage electronically at exactly the right moment. “

Thomas: Not sure about AR deals as such, but Total Immersion getting offices in the US is a good sign for the company and AR in general.

6) A [Predictable?] disappointment

Gizmondo won’t be coming out this year after all…The Nordik Link has the scoop.

7. Last minute find: A Surprising Simplicity in AR

Anyone can build 3D models with Google’s Sketchup. With the AR Media plugin from Inglobe – anyone can bring it into an augmented reality scene. ArchDaily tried it here.

Thanks for contributors and especially: Charles Woodward, Oriel Bergig, and the always there AR enthusiast: Thomas Wrobel

Bonus: Blair MacIntyre shares his greatest AR moments in 2009 in his blog.

The last session of ISMAR ‘08 is about to begin, and it concentrates on perfecting Rendering and Scene Acquisition in augmented reality and making it even more realistic.

First on stage is Yusaku Nishin with a challenging talk attempting Photometric registration by adaptive high dynamic range image generation for augmented reality.

His goal : development of photorealistic augmented reality with a High Dynamic Range (HDR) image.

Estimating the lighting environment of virtual objects is difficult because of low dynamic range cameras. In order to overcome this problem, they propose a method that estimates the lighting environment from an HDR image and renders virtual objects using an HDR environment map. Virtual objects are overlaid in real-time by adjusting the dynamic range of the rendered image with tone mapping according to the exposure time of the camera. The HDR image is generated from multiple images captured with various exposure times.

Now you are ready to watch the resulted effect. Incredible.

[youtuve=http://www.youtube.com/v/M53Tqqdk9w0]

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Next on stage is the soon-to-be-hero-of-the-show Georg Klein (more on that later…) Compositing for Small Cameras

Blending virtual items on real scenes. It can work with small cameras. Video from such cameras tend to be imperfect (blurring, over saturation, radial distortion, etc) so when you impose a virtual item it tend to stick out in a bad way. Since we can’t improve the live video – we will try to adapt the virtual item to match the video at hand. Simply put, Georg samples the background and applies it to the image which matches blur, radial distortion, rotation, color saturation, etc) and he does it in 5 millisecond on a desktop… For details check the pdf paper; take a look for yourself and tell me if it works on Kartman:

Done! Georg is already working on the next challenge.

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Following is Pished Bunnun introduces his work: OutlinAR: an assisted interactive model building system with reduced computational effort

Building 3D models interactively and in place (in-situ), using a single camera, and low computational effort – with a makeshift joystick (Button and wheels.)

In this case the video does a better job at explaining the concept than any number of words would…

Pished demonstrates it’s fast and pretty robust. You judge for yourself.

If you absolutely need more words about this – start here.

The team’s next challenge: make curved lines…

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In the very last talk of the event Jason Wither courageously takes on another challenge to perfecting augmented reality, with his talk: Fast Annotation and Automatic Model Construction with a Single-Point Laser Range Finder

Jason is using a laser finder typically used by hunters (though he will not be shooting anything or anybody), mounted on the head or handheld, in conjunction with a parallel camera. First he wants to create an annotation. that’s totally trivial. But you can then orient the annotation according to a building for example.

Next, he is going to correct occlusion of virtual objects by real objects for improved augmented realism. Just click before and after the object and pronto:

Finally he will create a 3D model of an urban environment semi-automatically, by creating a depth map courtesy of the laser. To achieve that he’s using a fusion process. You got to see that video; the laser’s red line advancing on buildings reminds me the blob swallowing the city in that quirky Steve McQueen movie.

In conclusion this is a really low cost and fast approach for modeling and annotation of urban environments and objects. That capability would become extremely handy once Augmented Reality 2.0 picks up and anyone would want to annotate the environment (aka draw graffiti without breaking the law).

Next is the event wrap up and the results of the Tracking Competition. Stay tuned.

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From the ISMAR ‘08 program:

Rendering and Scene Acquisition

• Photometric registration by adaptive high dynamic range image generation for augmented reality
  Yusaku Nishina, Bunyo Okumura, Masayuki Kanbara, Naokazu Yokoya
• Compositing for Small Cameras (pdf paper)
  Georg Klein, David Murray
• OutlinAR: an assisted interactive model building system with reduced computational effort
  Pished Bunnun, Walterio Mayol-Cuevas
• Fast Annotation and Automatic Model Construction with a Single-Point Laser Range Finder
  Jason Wither, Chris Coffin, Jonathan Ventura, Tobias Hollerer

Una novela de espías, así recibió la crítica a esta novela,  Libidissi, de Georg Klein,  para mí uno de los mejores escritores alemanes, pero que las editoriales tienen un poco olvidado, es justo decir que también es  un autor un tanto difícil de seguir y su forma de escribir y relatar las historias es un poco caótica, lo que hace que esta novela no sea la  clásica novela de espías, hay que estar muy al tanto de lo que se lee para saber ir descifrando los acontecimiento por los que pasa su personaje y que acontecen en la ciudad de Libidissi, una ciudad futura, que puede ser un compendio de las capitales árabes, Beirut, Damasco  o Beirut, en donde los ciudadanos están divididos en dos facciones, y tendrá que descubrir una fuga de información, novela un tanto futurista  y un poco kafkiana en su desarrollo, donde el protagonista espera verse con el relevo que le mandan y el cual tiene orden de matarle.

Novela que se lee de un tirón y que deja un poso de querer más, como si la historia no hubiera terminado. Una ficción un tanto surrealista.

Ficha:

Lengua: Castellano

Editorial: Muchnik

Páginas: 208

Edición: 1º

Año: 2000

ISBN: 978-84-7669-438-1