I do enjoy Augmented Reality Apps, and wanted to mention one from the new movie Walking With Dinosaurs that is both educational and silly fun, and carries my favorite price tag: Free. It allows you to embed and position whichever dinosaur you select into the photographs you take and teaches you a bit about them in the process. The Walking With Dinosaurs App comes in both iPad and Android flavors.
Doctor Who: Legacy is a free mobile RPG/Puzzle game app from BBC Worldwide and Tiny Rebel Games, yet another celebration of 50 years of the Tardis. It starts off with the most recent Doctor, Companions, and Villeins from the latest two seasons, but the plan is to expand it to cover everyone from the entire 50 year history of the series. They have versions for Apple and Android, and I should probably mention that the game supports micro-purchases, meaning you can acquire objects and characters by spending real money. Personally I went into settings and turned that function off, but every day in December they plan to have new stuff for free including K-9 and Sarah Jane Smith, and in early 2014 they will have everyone from Series 5 also available for free. The screen shot is the first point in the game where the Doctor speaks to you and invites you to become a companion; the music and artwork for this game are quite tasty.
This is a silly app, spun off from a silly program that I like a lot. The Crazy Talk App allows you to take an Actor, record some dialog, and slave them together for lip syncing. Yes, I know, lots of apps do that. But this is the only one I know that gives you some slider bars that allow you to create and edit animated facial expressions for the resulting video. They have 2 App versions, one free and the other 99 cents. It does have a bit of a learning curve, and to take advantage of everything you will need to get the actual Crazy Talk Program, so you can do stuff like create your own Actors.
In honor of the Apple iStore’s 5th anniversary, a bunch of games and apps have become free for a limited amount of time. They haven’t made it official and posted them anywhere, but Kotaku figured it out, and Techtola has collected up the ones they could find and listed them on that page. There are a few real goodies newly made free, and as usual some turkeys thrown out in the hopes some folks will mistake quantity for quality. App Snatcher lists some of them as well, but seems to be running a bit slow (probably because of all the folks hitting the site), and includes a few the other sites have missed.
Happy Thanksgiving to those of you in or from the USA, wherever you are. One of the things to be thankful for is the Avengers Initiative Lite game, available for free for a limited time over at the App Store. Rampaging as the hulk is probably around the limits of my game skills, so I am expecting this to be fun. Obviously Marvel and Disney are hoping you get addicted to the free version and go ahead and buy the full version.
The folks over at Scientific American posted about tomorrow night’s Nova program What Will the Future Be Like, because it is hosted by one of their columnists/scientists. As you can see from the video they shared, Augmented Reality is one of the approaches they investigate. Yes, there are a lot of AR Apps already available, but we have barely scratched the surface on what is possible. I am setting my DVR for the program, just in case they don’t stream it after.