Not the snazziest of article titles but I couldn’t think of anything catchier. That point brings me to the addendum topic of this blog post, which is the unsexy nature of the hard work that goes on behind the scenes in the AR movement. But first, let’s see what’s going on in the scene.
W. Lee, Y. Park, V. Lepetit and W.Woo, showed off their paper “Point-and-Shoot for Ubiquitous Tagging on Mobile Phones,” at ISMAR10. These two nifty videos show off some crazy-good in situ markerless detection, including an x-wing fighter, complete with shadows, flying over a parking lot. Cue the movies:
The addendum point I wish to make today is that how much we forget all this amazing technology has been built on the backs of some amazing researchers. Back over a year and a half ago, most of the content online was from researchers. Now-a-days, we’re usually only showing the commercial videos which tend to be better constructed.
However, there’s something truly awesome about the unvarnished videos from pre-hype days like the ones here. You can almost feel the excitement when they got the project working and rushed to the camera to record their efforts and upload it to YouTube–more Wright Brothers than Donald Trump.
So if you’re a researcher and I’ve missed your AR research video, please send me a note, along with some background information on the project and I’ll be happy to highlight you here on Games Alfresco.
Our own Ori Inbar was interviewed by MetaverseOne a few months ago. The two part interview is long, but worth the twenty-seven minutes of viewing. Ori gives his thoughts on AR, the gaming industry and other topics.
It’s a good sign that a comedian can do jokes about augmented reality and still be funny, including the minor tech fail. Still, we’re a long way from Conan whipping out the funny, but I’m encouraged. What’s next? A Thursday night sitcom based on AR?
Last year at ISMAR09, the keynote speech from Mark Mine of the Disney Imagineering group, really intrigued me. I had been a hardcore Disney hater before that, but Mark’s behinds-the-scenes look at the technology of Disney, specifically how they used augmented reality, softened my stance.
Cue forward almost one year exactly, in a strange twist of fate and of overenthusiastic grandparents, I find myself at Disney for a week. Since I was going to be at Disney, I decided to check out all the AR attractions that Mark Mine had talked about in his presentation. I got to see all the applications I wanted to see except one (Magic Sand) and this is what I learned from the experience:
1) True location based gaming can be a blast
The Kim Possible Adventure game in Epcot was my kids favorite event from the Disney properties. Each player receives a cellphone and then they follow the clues around until they solve the mystery. The game uses RFID tags to know when the player is in the right location. This game is as much an alternate reality game as AR, but either could do the job marvelously. There were about eight total missions in the various countries of Epcot and the kids did all of them. I did a few with them and then let them do the rest on their own.
Now that markerless AR is becoming more common with products like Junaio Glue and Google Goggles, I’d like to see someone make a few ARGames based on the Kim Possible model. It was truly a fun experience that the whole family enjoyed.
2) AR needs to be a product not a feature
In the Disney Downtown area, there’s a wonderful LEGO store with amazing statues made of LEGO bricks. In the back of the store, there’s a LEGO AR Kiosk. Since Metaio’s LEGO kiosk was one of the first applications of AR a few years ago, I won’t go into the details of what it is. But what I will talk about is the hour I stood in the back of the store and watched people interact with it.
Quite a number of parents and kids picked up boxes and held them in front of the camera. They seemed amused for a second and then quickly put them down and moved on. I asked a few people what they thought of it and they mostly shrugged without saying much.
The problem I see is that most usages of AR currently are add-on features that are cool in themselves, but don’t actually add to the experience of the product. For AR to be truly memorable it needs to be both conspicuous and integral to the product.
3) Projection based AR is the future of amusement parks
Projection based AR at Disney was everywhere. From Buzz Lightyear’s talking statue; to projected skins across landscapes or objects; or full fledged projected realities that came alive when the haptic chair you sat in moved with the reality. While this one isn’t going to do much for the average AR programmer, as their medium is the cell phone and not an amusement ride, the amusement parks are going to rely on AR more and more for their advanced special effects. I think my favorite example was the Forbidden Journey ride at the Harry Potter area of Universal. I honestly cannot tell you exactly what all was AR, or animatronics, or just smoke and mirrors, but it was truly awesome. It actually felt like you were there in a place that only exists in our collective minds and sprung from JK Rowling. That makes the far-future of AR both scary and exciting, and I’m glad to be along for the ride.
Total Immersion created a five-minute augmented reality presentation for Bill Chang, EVP of the Business Group of SingTel, to visually illustrate the complex process of business cloud computing in a simple-to-understand manner. In doing so, they’ve shown us the future of presentations, at least for CEOs and other business rock star positions that can afford the service. It’s possible weather reporting schools will have an uptick in students as presenters learn how to work the screen.
Who would want to use PowerPoint if you could have augmented reality to amaze your audience? I know I wouldn’t.
I can see you’re a little bored (yes, I’ve hacked your webcam) and I’ve scoured the Intertoobs to find some augmented reality to cheer you up. From free to over one hundred dollars, here are a few ways to inject a little spice into your boring life.
Free – AR on Webcams
Does it work for Chatroulette (don’t click that unless you have a strong stomach)?
I applaud the robust hand tracking, but could the game be something new rather than a Pac Man rip-off? Come on Total Immersion. You guys are better than this.
Augmented reality will make superheros of us all. A preview of what you can expect for ISMAR2010 from Magic Vision Lab.
Sandor, C., Cunningham, A., Dey, A., and Mattila, V.
An Augmented Reality X-Ray System based on Visual Saliency
To appear in: Proceedings of IEEE International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality, Seoul, Korea, October, 2010.
In the past, several systems have been presented that enable users to view occluded points of interest using Augmented Reality X-ray visualizations. It is challenging to design a visualization that provides correct occlusions between occluder and occluded objects while maximizing legibility. We have previously published an Augmented Reality X-ray visualization that renders edges of the occluder region over the occluded region to facilitate correct occlusions while providing foreground context. While this approach is simple and works in a wide range of situations, it provides only minimal context of the occluder object.
In this paper, we present the background, design, and implementation of our novel visualization technique that aims at providing users with richer context of the occluder object. While our previous visualization only employed one salient feature (edges) to determine which parts of the occluder to display, our novel visualization technique is an initial attempt to explore the design space of employing multiple salient features for this task. The prototype presented in this paper employs three additional salient features: hue, luminosity, and motion.
We have conducted two evaluations with human participants to investigate the benefits and limitations of our prototype compared to our previous system. The first evaluation showed that although our novel visualization provides a richer context of the occluder object, it does not impede users to select objects in the occluded area; but, it also indicated problems in our prototype. In the second evaluation, we have investigated these problems through an online survey with systematically varied occluder and occluded scenes, focussing on the qualitative aspects of our visualizations. The results were encouraging, but pointed out that our novel visualization needs a higher level of adaptiveness.
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