Rewarding both operators and designers for design excellence, the Restaurant & Bar Design Awards now in its second year and totally independent, is the only concept of its kind dedicated exclusively to design.

With only one month to go, the winners of the Awards, including Best Restaurant and Best Bar, will be announced at a cutting-edge ceremony on 22nd June at Victoria House in Central London.

Through the use of new technologies (including RFID), the Awards event will not only reflect entrants’ creativity, but also offer a unique space where guests will be able to celebrate, relax and network with the leaders of the bar and restaurant design industries.

Attended by both the UK and world’s top hospitality designers, architects and operators, this will be one of the most exciting and innovative events in the hospitality and design calendar.

Fingers crossed. Read more here: www.restaurantandbardesignawards.com

Like classic American food, beer on tap, large portions, milkshakes and great music with a welcoming atmosphere? Then it sounds like you’ll love The Diner which offers all this within eclectic surrounds at five venues throughout central London. The guys over at The Diner wanted to get all this across to potential customers via a spanking new website, and we’re proud to announce that this is now open for your viewing pleasure.

The Diner offers classic American dining with a modern twist. To get this feeling across we’ve used a cutting edge technology, Papervision 3D, to create a site that puts you in inside a virtual 3D Diner online.

The site takes visual elements that can be found at any of the Diners across London, along with a sample of the brilliant music you’ll hear there, via some Last.fm wizardry.

Take a look over at www.goodlifediner.com

Want to read more about how we created this site?

Augmented reality has arrived with a bang on the internet over the last year or so. Basically augmented reality can display computer generated graphics in real world environments on your computer screen. The latest developments have seen it implemented with the Papervision 3d library, which itself made a lot of Flash developers suitably excited when it first appeared. This means you can place 2d and 3d objects into a real enviroment captured via a webcam. Because of open source libraries, its webcam support and its mass use online Flash has become the easiest way to implement augmented reality apps.

We’ve had fireworks, monsters and helicopters, then things got a bit more interactive for example this groovy Xbox controller example and one that displays live information from twitter.

But recently its started to be picked up some digital agencies and developed into some cool stuff for brands. Three of the best examples are the Baseball collectors cards that double up as 3d baseball characters, the Toyota iQ site with its rolling car  and the mini catalogue that shows you a scaled 3d model of the car.

It is nice to see a new technology picked up by brands so quickly, and I don’t think we’ve seen the end of these at the moment. Topps for me is the best implementation so far, as its adding value to existing products. I hope one day that instead viewing all this on a computer screen it will be projected onto glasses so the user sees it all from their point of view as that would be very cool.

UPDATE: Someone has already done some augmented reality gaming with projection glasses. Check it out.