The guys at Hit Lab New Zealand and the Visual Media Lab at the Ben Gurion University, Israel, have uploaded a new video presenting the results of their ISMAR09 paper “In-Place 3D Sketching for Authoring and Augmenting Mechanical Systems”. Since the paper is not online yet, I can’t really tell how much of it is really automatic, and how robust is it, but the video is nothing less than magical:
I really envy those future physics high-school students…
As I blogged before, the work Gamaray, one of the prominent early AR browsers, has stopped. At the time, I was suggesting, like many others on Gamaray’s mailing list, that the man behind the project, Clayton Lilly, should release Gamaray’s code to the community. Lilly, I’m happy to report, have decide to do just that. In his recent post to the mailing list, he writes:
I’ve made the source code available in the files section, but there
are some things you should know:
1) Gamaray doesn’t use OpenGL, the 3D objects are all rendered in
software. This means the application will never support the kind of
animations or textures found in Layar and Wikitude 3D.
2) Much of the code is not very well thought out and I don’t plan on
spending any time explaining it.
3) I don’t plan on supporting an open source project, someone else
will need to upload it to a repository and manage the updates.
I would recommend starting fresh and just picking out the useful
tidbits.
So, if you are interested, the source code can be found here. At least one good thing turned out of this dire situation.
I had a pleasant surprise this morning when Chris O’Shea sent me a mail with his latest work Hand from Above. This public art installation features a giant hand that through the magic of OpenCV and some smart programming on O’Shea’s part, tickles, picks and pounds unsuspecting pedestrians:
Yes, I know, it’s not augmented reality according to Azuma’s definition, but it’s certainly original and a lot of fun. It could have been even more fun, if I could control the hand myself, but my god delusions will wait for now. More details on O’Shea’s site, where you should really take a look at “Out of Bounds”, another art installation that has a strong AR motif.
Yes, the following video is nothing more than a demo for Dassault Systemes AR campaign for the feature film “Arthur and the Revenge of Maltazard“. I usually don’t give such videos a full post, especially when there’s no site I can link to, but it seems like a cute game, and what happens at 1:25 surprised me.
Maybe I’m too jaded with AR campaigns that such a trick surprised me, but it made me smile, and that’s good enough.
(via @lavalvirtual)
Arcade Reality is a game, originally developed a couple of years ago for the Palm Treo, by Szymon Ulatowski, the man behind ToySpring, which has an interesting premise. For years, space invaders were slaughtered in video games by arcade dwellers around the world. Now, they stage their revenge in real world and the player must shoot them down via his/her mobile phone:
Recently Ulatowski has ported the game to the iPhone. While on the Treo it used some basic video registration to place the invaders around you, on the iPhone it takes advantage of the compass and accelerometer. Although it does make the alien spaceships a little wobbly, it still looks like the best game of its type currently available for the iPhone and a lot of fun:
This stunning “Jakomini” demo from Graz University – the masters of handheld Augmented Reality – shows a 3D city model being tracked on a “natural feature” surface (or in plain language – a regular bird’s view image of a city)
Wow.
What handheld was used for this demo?
(My guess is it’s Nvidia’s Tegra)
What’s behind the mysterious Jakomini name?
(Jakomini is the 6th District of Graz and the most populous)
Christine Perey, chair of the ISMAR Mobile Committee, has posted two interesting AR articles on O’Reilly Radar – “See it, Follow it” where she discusses real-world recognition, and Look Through the AR Window where she tries to create a taxonomy for mobile AR application (via @noazark)
What’s people’s perception of augmented reality? Is it positive or negative? By studying blogs (which, of course, is a representative sample), public opinion is positive, very positive. (via @augmentreality)
If you are wondering how come there’s not one link pointing to a new augmented reality browser, they had their day yesterday.
This week’s video is of an odd AR application for the iPhone, named Sun Seeker. Basically, it lets you see, overlaid on top of the real world, where the sun is, and where it’s going to be throughout the day and year. Pointless? Well, the video does present an interesting use-case when buying a new house. Learn more about it, here.
Yes, there are so many of new augmented reality browsers each week, they deserve their own post, instead of clogging the weekly linkfest. Here are the browsers that made news this week, in no particular order (well, ok, those they I liked are on top):
Air Painter
Previously we featured geoPaste, an Android application that lets you draw on real-life. Air Painter is a Japanese Android application with a similar premise, though its user interface seems a bit more refined, as can be seen in the video below (don’t worry about the German, you don’t have to understand it to see how cool this application is). More information on AirPainter’s hompeage, and here’s another video.
LooKATOR
LooKATOR shows you WiFi signals floating on top of Android’s video feed. Follow the spots to get stronger signal/stronger dose of radiation. Some details here, no official homepage that I can find (via DMFO)
WhereMark
An augmented reality browser with a slick interface for the iPhone, that features results from Google’s local search. Like most browsers these days, it also lets users add their own content. Some more information, in WhereMark’s homepage.
uTourX
uTourX is an iPhone browser like application, for the niche market of American students touring colleges before they sign in. Nothing much special, except the over-acting in the following video. Homepage
Vicrea’s Browser
I don’t have any better name for it. Vicrea is a Dutch corporation, and the next video shows a concept augmented reality application they are developing. They should really just ask Layar to give them a branded version. More information, here, in Dutch. (via DMFO)
Two things that I like about the Augmented Reality community are the spirit of creativity and the spirit of sharing.
From the Tellart website
This letter from Mike Clare embodies these 2 traits:
This summer I worked on a number AR projects while interning at Tellart in Providence RI. On my last day I thought I would bring in something to show my appreciation to my co-workers for having me as their intern. What better way than batch of home made AR marker cookies that would display Tellart’s logo?
Vodpod videos no longer available.
In addition, Mike has prepared a tutorial so that others could try making them at home.
That’s creativity and sharing in the power of 2 (cookies and recipe).
I couldn’t decide whether I should dedicate a whole post or just a tweet to the next project. On the one hand, I don’t know much about it, and its homepage is in Finnish. On the other hand, the video is in English, and shows a concept that can become a huge buisness – augmented telepresence:
In a nutshell telepresence is a turbo-charged version of video-conference, that aspire to give you the feeling that you are really in the remote location. There are some companies around the world that invest loads of money in developing better and better telepresence experiences, because they believe it’s going to be a billion-dollar market. Now, is there a better experience than seeing your remote pal in 3d across the table?
Obviously, ACME, the project featured in the above video, doesn’t come close to making this idea a reality. But it does let you see you companion’s avatar, which mimics his gestures, and share with him a virtual desktop.
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