The posts I like the most are about student projects. Luckily here’s another one.
A couple of students from the German research institute, the Fraunhofer Society created what they name “The Augmented Reality Flashlight”. Basically, it’s a micro-projector held as a flashlight to shed light (i.e. annotate) objects in your vicinity. Yep, projected AR is not dead after all.
So, what’s novel about this technique? After all, we all saw MIT’s Sixth Sense half a year ago. One of the students, Robert Brauer explains:
[the novelty is in] The metaphorical approach. The whole “flashlight” thing changes the style of working from the ergonomic perspective – which was our initial motivation.
In technical space I’d say that we concentrate going “pure pinky”. Based on the interaction technique there is no need for coloured finger caps. We try to work naturally on and furthermore with the object. Although we really like the MIT project, the finger caps are to us what the stylus was to mobile phones. Unnecessary and annoying.
You can read more details over Brauer’s blog. If you are a student that happen to work on an AR project, feel free to send me a mail, I’m just a few clicks away :)
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tagged: Fraunhofer, Markerless, Projector based AR |
Games Alfresco 
While I think projector AR is a dead-end tech, the skills and ideas developed with this stuff is usefull elsewhere.
Specifically I’m very in favor of the “annotate everything” ideas. Not just geolocation annotations, but to annotate objects like books, and for anyone with the same book to be able to bring up those annotations regardless of location.