Back. It seems that I escaped London on the very last minute before the airports closed down. Here’s a rundown of augmented reality links for the last couple of weeks:
PrimeSense, Willow Garage, and Side-Kick Games join hands to create to OpenNI an organization whose goal is to promote natural interaction. First step was releasing ‘official’ drivers for Kinect.
Follow this link to see a video of bad acting and terrible music. Oh, and some clever eye tracking based augmented reality UI from Helsinki university of technology.
A nice piece on Neatorama, which went QR crazy lately, on surprising mediums for QR codes, including a sand castle and a M&Ms.
The biggest news these days is Word Lens. I’m sure you have all seen it already, and I plan to write full post on it next week, but for the oft chance you haven’t yet encountered it – it’s augmented reality based translation app for the iPhone. Or in other words, magic:
Have a great week, winter/summer solstice and merry Christmas!
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.
Mario, probably the best known (fictional) plumber has already appeared in more than 200 games. No surprise that fans imagine an augmented reality game starring him. For example, here’s Youtube user Kain the heartbreaker‘s vision of a Mario game on iPhone 10:
I don’t usually consider projection on buildings augmented reality, but this video from Madrid has a fine twist. Instead of scaling a virtual construction site, Mario fights Donkey Kong on a real building:
Finally, here’s another video coming to us from Madrid, this time from Espada y Santa Cruz Studio. A bit more information can be found here (in Spanish).
We have covered quite a few art projects using augmented reality as their canvas, but nothing of the scale of Biggâr. Created by Sander Veenhof, can best be described as a virtual sculpture composed of more than 7 billion blocks encompassing the whole world.
Using Layar, you can not only view Biggâr but also interact with its blocks. A single tap on your phone is all it takes to change the color of all 7 billion blocks (sadly only three colors are available to choose from). I failed to experience a live color change, but it should be quite a trip. More info here.
Games Alfresco 