Playing games is intrinsic to our nature, so naturally, gaming is a great introduction to augmented reality. Below are three different ways augmented reality is being used to get our gaming fix.
AR Invaders
Shooter games were the first breakout, relatively speaking, for the nascent technology. Yet I haven’t yet seen one that eliminates the “floating target” problem and makes the game feel immersive. Let’s hope AR Invaders gets us further along that path.
Eclipse AR Card Game
The video could use some production value and the game play appears to be a little clunky, but they have the right idea. I still believe Magic the Gathering and a console maker like PlayStation should team up to give their game a little 3D magic, but maybe that’s just me. Check with Mo0n-Studio if you want to learn more about their game.
World of Warcraft Armor Project
Let’s face it, WoW is a force of gaming nature with around ten million paying subscribers. Giving players a way to embrace their character just a little more interactively just makes sense. You can guarantee that if AR glasses were viable and widely sold that Blizzard would be selling the service for a pretty dime. Go here for more information.
Lisa from Metaio wanted everyone to know that they will be announcing a partnership with eBay on Wednesday, and they created a teaser video to celebrate. At first thought, augmented reality and location based services could bring a Craig’s List functionality to the auction giant, but we’ll have to wait and see.
I just can’t get enough of these Kinect projects. I’m sure I’ll bore of them eventually, but it’s like someone took a blender to reality and starting throwing pieces back in randomly. Give me some functional AR glasses and we can really dive into layers of reality.
Today’s feature is from Yummyfuture (or Matt Bell), who has fired up the blender on another project:
I wrote some software to merge multiple 3D video streams captured by the Kinect into a single 3D space. Objects from each video stream are superimposed as if they occupy the same physical space, with nearby objects from one video occluding more distant ones from another. Sometimes objects overlap, creating interesting mutant forms.
Next, I want to make 3D-merges of cats, dancers, silk aerialists, martial arts experts, that painting Nude Descending a Staircase, that scene from Alien, and much more…
The movie Minority Report is often cited as an example and an inspiration for augmented reality. The Microsoft Kinect is bringing that movie magic to the living room.
It uses the Kinect sensor from Microsoft, and the recently released libfreenect driver for interfacing with the Kinect in linux. The graphical interface and the hand detection software were written at MIT to interface with the open source robotics package ‘ROS’, developed by Willow Garage (willowgarage.com). The hand detection software showcases the abilities of the Point Cloud Library (PCL), a part of ROS that MIT has been helping to optimize. The hand detection software is able to distinguish hands and fingers in a cloud of more than 60,000 points at 30 frames per second, allowing natural, real time interaction.
The nice folks at Avant-Garde Events sent an updated video of the projection Syndey Town Hall event. The video contains only the best highlights so it’s worth the two minute viewing.
When writing The Digital Sea, invisibility was one of the cool effects I thought was possible with ubiquitous augmented reality. I didn’t expect to see tangible examples so soon. Granted, without AR glasses, all the effects are static on the screen and only eye candy. But what glorious eye candy Fukatsu-san makes. The predator alien would be proud.
The second video from yummyfuture shows us how to make ghost images of furniture (or whatever you’d like to do.)
These architectural magic shows never cease to amaze me, even if it’s a front for a movie advertisement.
The Joule in conjunction with The Tourist movie team and Dallas Film Society put on an augmented reality show in downtown Dallas to promote “The Tourist” with Angelina Jolie and Johnny Depp. Uploaded from an android phone. The facade of the Praetorian Building at 1607 Main Street acted as the canvas onto which an eye-popping mish-mash of effects combine to make it appear as though the building was coming apart stone by stone, covered with propellers or being shot up in a gun fight and then crumbling.Projection by IllumeNight, LLC. All content created by Jack Hattingh – TVP Media.
The Kinect has become the all-in-one sensor bar of choice for modders everywhere. The ability for the Kinect to do facial and gesture recognition, sensing 3D under any ambient light condition, combined with a rapidly expanding hacker tools, has made it indispensable for true AR.
While the Kinect Hacks site has been documenting the every aspect of the accelerating progress, I’m just interested in the applications for augmented reality. This one caught my eye today as the implications reminded me of one of my favorite dystopia films – The Running Man. The resolutions and seamless adjustments are decades away, but it’s fun to imagine anyway.
Helen Papagiannis opens her talk with a question: “Think about how you saw something new for the first time.” She goes on to relate that to the magic of her augmented reality piece at the Ontario Science Centre and how the first movies invoked the same sense of wonderment. I agree with her assessment that AR brings a sense of wonder and magic back to technology. I don’t think I would still be writing about augmented reality two years and three-hundred and fifty posts later if it didn’t hold that sense of wonder for me.
Helen Papagiannis is an artist, designer, and researcher specializing in Augmented Reality (AR). Hailed as being among the top 10 forces currently shaping the AR industry, Papagiannis has been working with AR since 2005 exploring the creative possibilities and theoretical implications for this exciting emerging technology. Recently, Papagiannis’ interactive artworks were featured in an exhibition at the Ontario Science Centre. She is presently completing her Ph.D. in Communication and Culture at York and is a Senior Research Associate at the Augmented Reality Lab (Department of Film, Faculty of Fine Arts). Prior to her graduate studies, Helen was a member of the internationally renowned Bruce Mau Design studio, where she was project lead on Massive Change: The Future of Global Design.
Games Alfresco 