The View From Above: In Hard Focus Round-Up (August 12, 2011)

The Augmented City: AR company Metaio is drawing lots of attention for its new Junaio app. They promise to make the "digital world surrounding us a natural experience." That means “...not just showing some type of information on top of a camera image, but truly embedding the digital information into the real world as a natural experience.” We like the sound of that. Check out the demo and interview above. 

Out of the Lab and into the Wild: Illinois engineering professor and researcher Thomas Huang is using computer vision technologies to identify wildlife – and understand how "human activity and environmental changes impact wildlife species." Setting up motion-sensitive cameras in Missouri and Panama to observe wildlife (no note on why these locations were chosen), the goal is to create an algorithm from size, texture, etc. to automate how researchers are able to identify animal movement. That's what I'd call technology in the wild. 

Turning Instagram Photos into Keepsakes: Instagram has definitely taken off in the photo sharing space (only four employees, but 150+ million photos taken by 7+ million users), but how do you go about enjoying those filtered images without a smartphone or computer in front of you? A recent GeekSugar post highlights six different ways to make them into last works of art.