Living in an Augmented Reality

Engadget has a new article with details on the schedule for when we might see a new Gizmondo.  

The Gizmondo when under back in 2006 under dubious circumstances, but it’s still got some legs (especially if some of the core chips are updated, even slightly).  I have been using them in my research since the summer of 2006, when NVidia gave me my first one (they didn’t want to dish out GOForce dev kits to us lowly academics, so they gave me a Gizmondo with the technical information on the GOForce 4500 chipset inside it).

After the company crashed (figuratively and literally), it became increasingly easy to pick them up on eBay … I ended up with a dozen or so, and amazingly enough, they are STILL one of the best devices for handheld AR 2 years later (on a price/performance level).  Rugged, easy to program, decent camera, ok 3D.

Right now we’re running a course on handheld augmented reality game design using the Gizmondo, where we have a great set of students (CS and CM students from Georgia Tech, and design/animation students from SCAD-Atlanta) working to prototype AR games;  we’ll see how it goes, but the first round of prototypes were pretty descent!  

It would be nice to have new Gizmondo’s to run them on some day …