 If you don't have quite enough cash saved up for an Olympus E-PL1, Olympus is giving you the chance to torture and taunt yourself via augmented reality with the ability to "test drive" an E-PL1 using your webcam.
You can either pick up the June edition of Wired to find a reality tip-in card that's shaped like an E-PL1, or you can print one out and cut it. The PEN 3D program asks for a marker to be placed in front of the webcam, so of course, we grabbed the nearest Sharpie and felt like idiots for approximately three minutes until we realized that a paper cutout of the E-PL1 had to be placed in front of the webcam in order to kick off the augmented reality trip.
Once the marker takes, a 3D graphic that looks like it was created in a DeVry University CAD class appears in your hands. A series of yellow target buttons appeared at various locations on the camera, allowing us click on them with the mouse and have the flash pop up, take pictures, record video, remove the lens, etc. Of course, this was all done within the land of augmented reality, so it made us pine for a PEN even more.
Luckily, all we had to do was reach across our desk to grab a real E-PL1, adorned with a brand new 9-18mm M.Zuiko wide-angle angle lens and Sema-1 stereo microphone set. We'll have the full review out in a couple of weeks, but all we can say at the moment is that the Olympus E-PL1 is truly a gem among cameras.
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