Hollywood’s Night at the Museum franchise may be great at teaching to kids appreciate museums from their living room, but this tech goes further in creating an enriched experience off the couch in an actual museum.

The Good
Rather than a “virtual museum” that is a substitute to the real thing, this technology is complimentary to the actual artifacts as displayed in a existing exhibit.  The implementation is not invasive and allows for both a traditional and enhanced view of the exhibit.

The Ugly

The Bad
This is tomorrow’s software with hardware from a 1950s trip to the Grand Canyon and is the disappointing part of the user experience and interface.  A borrowed or rented smart phone like device with headphones that can be checked in and checked out would be preferable.

Coin operated with a timer?  People lining up for their turns?  On a busy day at the museum it could get ugly.

Mind Space Solutions has developed some other great AR educational tools.  Check out this virtual interactive 3D beating human heart (without pithing a single frog) and other Virtual 3d learning objects featured on their website.

[Augmented Planet]

The site features some really great story books from smaller, indy publishing houses.  The story I read was from Immedium.  So an added benefit, is you can discover great new stories before you notice them in your favorite bookstore.  The selection is pretty limited right now, but if things go well, they should be getting more soon.  A webcam is required, of course.  The interface is slick and very usable, I was recording my first story within minutes.

They’re hip to the try before you buy business model and let you record and view a story for 24 hours.  It’s 6.99 to buy.

It’s like your own personal Reading Rainbow recording studio minus LeVar Burton,  a cool ’80s theme song, and excessive use of the Ken Burns effect.

Abedtimestory.com is a clever, well-packaged bit of storytime tech with a warm human touch.  It’s an open question whether or not your child will want to watch a story more than a few times, but it’s definitely fun for grown ups!

The Good
Very easy to use.  A great excuse for grandma & grandpa to put the built-in webcam in their new laptop to use.

The Bad
Watch videos on the iphone, ipod, etc. is not currently available.  I’m sure it’ll be coming soon… but c’mon people, it’s a BED time story.  We don’t want to move the bed into the home office or bring the laptop to bed.

The Ugly
None.  The site is warm and easy to use and well designed.  An A+ job at humanizing a virtual bedtime story.

[A Story Before Bed via Wired's Geek Dad blog]

We’ve been seeing more and more augmented reality concepts for storytime.

This cool concept video features a cleverly designed window built in the storybook to allow for contextual interactivity.  It’s encouraging to see people leveraging devices we already have, like app phones and laptops with webcams to make technology like this possible without selling us more disposable electronics.

[japantrends via gizmodo]

Yes our kids love french fries, french toast, and Ratatouie.  As they grow older we can look forward to them prefacing curse words with that cute expression “pardon my french”.  Well folks, it may be time to add French cereal to the list.

Here we have a marketing project that turns a cereal box into an augmented reality game with 3d virtual object manipulation that is part of Dassault Systemes campaign for the feature film “Arthur and the Revenge of Maltazard“.  What’s surprising, is that it actually looks like a really cool game.

At Tech Tech Goose we believe that emerging technology is completely transforming the idea of interface devices in a way that can make computing fully accessible to anyone.  Those of you with multi-touch devices and children know that children as young as one or two can use them reasonably well.  Sure, we’ll be seeing more and more of these augmented reality marketing gimics, and eventually “ho hum” about it. But for now let’s think of it as the future of the ubiquitious interface or interface as world (take your pick) and imagine a future where our one year olds can trade stocks & start fashion trends online.

So yes, we have existing interfaces that are natural, intuitive, and accessible to children… but interface as cereal box!  Now we’re getting somewhere.  C’mon people it’s a cereal box! Be wowed.  Be proud.

[augmented times]

We’re seeing more and more of these augmented reality ideas to enhance traditional books. Like this Demo of Total Immersion’s Augmented Reality enhancement to a book on dragons by Templar Publishing

It’s hard to say which direction this will go: epaper, smartphones, augmented reality glasses.  I definitely prefer tech like this to cheap and toxic disposable electronics embedded in books.

What do you think?  Do we love books because they are low tech and prefer to keep them that way or are they overdue for an overhaul?  Does tech like this enhance our children’s imagination or diminish it?

[Total Immersion]