June 23, 2009

Ugly AR Ripoff at TED.com

I am completely dumbfounded. Hacker Chris Hughes made a very short presentation of Flash-based augmented reality in TED2009 without mentioning the open source projects (FLARToolkit and Papervision3D) that his very basic demo is almost completely based upon. In addition, he made remarks that let the audience understand that he had a major role in the development. Read more of the issue at UNITZEROONE.

Could it really have been true that the moderators of TED were so completely unaware of the state of the art in augmented reality? This presentation was a big failure on the part of the TED2009 organizers.

I don't think Chris's response quite cuts it. He should really apologize instead of making lame excuses about the "fear and frenzy" of speaking at a TED conference. On the other hand, I kind of feel sorry for the guy. Having made his appearance at TED practically an obsession, it surely does not feel good for him to come out of it looking so awfully bad.

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