No licensing issues here, really…
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.
Learn more on the Total Immersion blog.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tagged: AR Games, augmented reality, tasbeeraman, total immersion | 2 Comments »
Kind of slow week, but we still have some tasty links for you:
As for this week’s video we’ve got a little fun game from Total Immersion’s Partner C4M to promote French pasta brand Lustucru. Unlike previous TI games, this one is iPhone based, though there’s still a webcam version. It’s called Germaine et les Martiens:
Have a great week!
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tagged: ayar, linkfest, total immersion | 1 Comment »
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.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tagged: augmented reality, IEEE, ISMAR2010, Magicvision Lab, X-Ray Vision | 1 Comment »
This fall, Qualcomm is going to host a $200,000 Augmented Reality Developer Challenge. The details for the challenge haven’t been released yet, but the total amount of prize money should have would-be developers planning their products as we speak. The challenge will start when they release the Qualcomm AR SDK. More details can be found here.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tagged: AR Games, augmented reality, Qualcomm | 3 Comments »
Does this ad mark the transformation of augmented reality from being a term used by the tech-elite to one used by the commons?
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tagged: Handhelds and Cellphones, Samsung | 4 Comments »
Besides giving me an excuse to put a NASDAQ ticker over the latest Inspirational Poster, Gravity Jack is developing an SDK for their indoor system.
Features of the SiREAL World SDK in development now:
IPS – Indoor positioning system, using a patent pending method the phones running our software create a mesh that allows us to position the phone exactly in a Cartesian space indoors. It is almost like walking around with your phone acting like an RFID tag but with coordinates. We also use patented vision techniques to make your phone become the symbol thereby avoiding symbol recognition.
Instant Mapping – Utilizing a combination of scene recognition and real time edge detection we can build the real world scene into a 3d wireframe model on the fly. This allows for actually placing 3d objects in the scene and even behind real world objects because we have depth built into our model. AR products today just overlay things on the same front layer. Our technology allows us to place objects in the actual 3d plain.
GeoLocation and Proximity Alert – Allows a user to receive push notifications when they are near a SiREAL object and for storage of GeoTags for placing objects in the real world.
Asset management server – Our asset management server allows you to upload 3d assets or triggers, symbols associated with those assets and our object recognition will return the correct asset to your application.
Stickyness – While not a technical feature – what we have discovered is that by creating augmented reality applications and an engine that allows for true, non gimmick, life enhancing AR; users keep coming back! AR isn’t just a gimmick with us.
In summary, we fully support existing technology like symbol recognition, GPS tagging, but have new ways for AR to work indoors, in the dark, socially and we can create stickyness in our AR applications. Not only that, our tech understands what it is looking at and gives depth to scenes – something currently done with expensive dual camera setups.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tagged: AR Games, augmented reality, Gravity Jack, Indoor Office | Leave a comment »
Mobile, image recognition based, augmented reality is very cool, as evident from the Popcode’s demos we posted yesterday. However, creation of a model used by the mobile phone to recognize a new image still requires a desktop, hindering realtime creation and sharing of AR content.
Thanks to the work of researchers from the Korean Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology and the Swiss EPFL, this needn’t be the case anymore. In a paper titled “Point-and-Shoot for Ubiquitous Tagging on Mobile Phones” accepted to ISMAR 2010, they present a method to scan surfaces and create “recognition-models” by using your phone (no data is sent to a remote server).
You don’t even need to take the perfect straight-on picture. As the video below shows, this means you can augment hard to reach surfaces. Best of all, you can share those models with your friends.
A little bit more detail over Wonwoo Lee’s blog.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tagged: EPFL, GIST Korea, Handhelds and Cellphones, ISMAR, Markerless, Research | Leave a comment »
The young British company, Extra Reality Ltd. (founded this June) has posted a couple of very impressive demos of its first product Popcode. With the goal of commercializing AR research done in the University of Cambridge, Popcode is a combination of marker based and marker less approaches. First the user needs to scan an easily identifiable code which causes her mobile to download a model used to register and augment a marker-less image. The registration seems quite robust:
The best thing is that Extra Reality provide an SDK to develop your own AR models, which can then be uploaded to their servers to be identified by clients worldwide. And it’s free for non-commercial use.
I’m a bit worried about their marker code, though, as it seems to contain a very limited number of bits. If Popcode becomes hugely successful (and I really hope so), they’ll have to come up with another scheme.
Sadly, it’s only available for Android right now, so I can’t really test it (hey, benevolent sponsors to be, this is a call for help!).
See more demos at Popcode’s website.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tagged: Cambridge, Extra Reality, Handhelds and Cellphones, Popcode | 6 Comments »
Games Alfresco 