What is augmented reality? How does it affect me? How will this technology change our world? Check out the event at Blushuis on the 23rd of March if you want to know more about this exciting technology.

Many of you may already know innovative apps like Layar who provide augmented reality on your phone, or maybe you own a webcam who uses this. If you’ve got a printer and webcam nearby you should check out this amazing demo to get a feeling for the possibilites.

Augmented Reality fun with a webcam

Augmented Reality fun with a webcam

Schedule

  • Gathering 16.30
  • Presentation 17.00 – 17.30
  • Discussion 17.30 -18.30
  • Drinks 18.30 – 20.00
This event is free of charge but you need to sign up via LinkedIn. Also note that this event will be mainly in Dutch.
 

The next (sixth) Dutch Drupaljam was already announced on Drupal.nl a couple of weeks ago, but now it’s official on the redesigned Drupaljam website. Don’t forget to signup!

Photo credits: Shira Golding taken at Stayokay Amsterdam Zeeburg

Location: Stayokay Amsterdam Zeeburg
Date: Friday March 19th 2010
Singup: online

 

I thought it might be nice to do a series of module reviews, handpicking some of the more interesting modules which have been released in the last couple of months. As you might know, new Drupal modules are released daily, and while they’re often beta’s or alpha’s many of them have great potential to become very useful, and maybe you didn’t even know they exist.

Tablefield
Take tablefield for example. It offers a simple, lightweight solution – though yet limited in features – to a common problem: displaying a simple table on a page. Of course there are wysiwyg editors which offer this type of functionality, but they require your client to understand how to use these more advanced options, often hidden under a right mouse-click pop-up menu.

Other alternatives would be to display an entire table-view beneath your node. But that is probably more than you need most of the time.

Depending on your needs, it might be enough when an editor could use a simple ‘wizard’ to enter some data, like a pricing sheet, which can be easily updated without having to fear you could mess up the entire layout. This is exactly what tablefield does. It offers a new cck field called ‘tableview’, which behaves like any other cck field. The options are limited to a number of columns and rows, and the first row will automatically be rendered as a header.

Biggest limitations: you can’t (yet) insert a new row or column, and while you can used filtered HTML, if you would like to put a link or image in a cell, it would require manual html input, since all cells are simple textfields. Also, since it’s a cck field, you can’t easily insert the table inline. Maybe integration with the excellent insert module could be an idea?

 

It’s been a while since the last Dutch Drupal meetup. The last being the Drupaljam which was in Utrecht. I guess everybody is busy with clients, projects and of course, Drupal 7, which has been released as an alpha 1 release last week.

Drupal meetup: Friday 29th of January, Utrecht
But in less than two weeks, you will be able to meet again with fellow Drupal in the Netherlands at the Utrecht International Meetup, thanks to BarisW for organising the event! Location: Belgian Beer Cafe “Olivier”. See the post for further details and signup, see you there!

Drupal Meetup in Utrecht

(Yes I know the perspective on the pin is wrong. Let's see you make a collage! ;)

 

Google released a lot of goodies the last few weeks. There is the birth of Chrome OS, then we saw the launch of real-time results, and now there is Google Goggles which will probably work great on the Google Phone, to be released next year. Between all this Google also released something called Living Stories, and meanwhile almost everyone now has received a Google Wave invite.

It does make you wonder a bit where all this is going…

Still, it *is* cool technology for the mobile web (which is the future). It’s exclusively available for Android, so I whopped out my HTC Hero to search for it on the market. However, I forget to read the fine print: Google Googles is only available for Android 1.6+ and my 4 months old Hero is still stuk on 1.4. HTC should have an update to 2.0 (or even 2.1) ready anytime now, if the rumours are true (skipping 1.6 all together)

In the meanwhile, you can also take a look at this short video to get an idea.

Google Goggles reminds me of Layar – but after looking a bit closer, it is a bit different. In addition to GPS and compass information, Goggles also has visual recognition software to detect your surroundings or object. It still in its infancy but looks very promising. Is it just a matter of time before Google buyes Layar to add the augmented reality (OpenGL) 3D environment to Goggles?