10 Awesome Ways to Use Kinect For Augmented Reality

Posted on December 21, 2010 by thomaskcarpenter

The last year the augmented reality movement has been accelerating at an ever increasing pace as new applications and companies are forming so fast it’s hard to keep up.  The addition of the Kinect sensor has given the technology an even bigger power boost and now I can barely keep up with just the Kinect related news, even when I regularly check the Kinect Hacks site.

While I’m certain this list and content would be different in another month, I think there is enough Kinect related stuff to take a look at the top ten uses of the Kinect sensor for augmented reality.  Here they are, in no particular order:

10. Play Music

Who says Tom Hanks should have all the fun?  I could show you a number of Kinect hacks for playing the piano with your hands, but doing it Big-style is all the more awesome.

9. Graffitti Tool

With the world as your canvas let your artistic soul flow.

8. Lightsaber Battles

Embrace the dark side with your inner Jedi.  Be the Star Wars Kid in real-time.  Now we just need some game play around the hack.

7. Utilize the technology from the Minority Report

Besides bringing us couch jumping madness on the Oprah show, Tom Cruise also played a part in bringing AR to the big screen.  Now you can utilize that same technology on your TV screen.

6. Puppet Shows

Puppets?  Puppets are kids stuff right?  Unless you’re not counting Chucky, Bride of Chucky, that alien thing that bursts out of your chest, etc.

5. Robot Sight

One of the biggest reasons why robots aren’t more widespread is because they can’t see the world like we do.  The Kinect system now gives robot designers a quick and easy way to help their robot see.  I’m even investigating using it for our automated logistics delivery vehicles at work.

4. Playing Games

Pretty obvious one, eh?  Could find a good dozen games to show you, but I’m a fan of the classics.  Besides, there’s that whole Xbox thing you can purchase that has a ton more Kinect games on it.  Who knew?

3. Invisibility

Not very useful until AR glasses are in widespread use, but to look like the Predator in your very own living room is spectacular.

2. Projection into Virtual Worlds

Lightsabers, remote projection, space stations; this hack has everything and more.  Even more fantastic is that the two people in the video are projecting from separate location.  Could Kinect sensors make telepresence more usable?

1. Sign Language Recognition

One of technologies more profound benefits to humankind is the ability to give those with disabilities more access to the world.  Just like a translation software, the Kinect sensor can read sign language and convert to human speech.  Or teach deaf children how to learn sign language.

Special thanks to Kinect Hacks for continuing to catalog the many wondrous uses of the Kinect sensor.

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Facebook 3D Movie Maker Contest

Posted on December 20, 2010 by thomaskcarpenter

AR door has teamed up with LG Electronics to create the Facebook 3D Movie Maker Contest.

Through advanced features LG 3D Moviemaker is pushing the boundaries of reality.  Trendsetting technologies bring the immersive 3D experience where instead of just watching scenes you can actually be part of them. The contest allows you to become the main character of a movie and get valuable presents for your skills and efforts.

To participate in the contest you should first go to the application on Facebook http://apps.facebook.com/lgmovie/, choose any genre you like (or all of them) and shoot a video. There are 4 genres to choose: horror, animation, fantasy and action. Choose the genre, print out the markers. Make sure you face fits the marked shape on the screen. When you are ready, press the rec button. When the video is done, don’t forget to send it to the contest.

After moderation all the videos submitted for the contest will be stored in the Events section of the web page http://www.facebook.com/LGRussia?v=app_2344061033. The winner who gets for the video the most number of likes will be rewarded with 3D TV by LG. The details and conditions of the contest are available here: http://www.facebook.com/notes.php?id=162805193749522&notes_tab=app_2347471856

The application is based on the patented Augmented Reality technology D’Fusion.

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Triple AR Gaming Goodness

Posted on December 16, 2010 by thomaskcarpenter

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.

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Metaio Teases Announcement with eBay

Posted on December 14, 2010 by thomaskcarpenter

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.

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Kinect Multiple Reality Madness

Posted on December 13, 2010 by thomaskcarpenter

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…

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Minority Report Interface Using Kinect

Posted on December 8, 2010 by thomaskcarpenter

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.

Code available here.

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Syndey Town Hall Highlights

Posted on December 6, 2010 by thomaskcarpenter

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.

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Predator Invisibility and Ghost Furniture with Kinect

Posted on December 4, 2010 by thomaskcarpenter

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.)

I think I could watch new Kinect video’s all day.

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AR Projection at the Dallas Praetorian

Posted on December 3, 2010 by thomaskcarpenter

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.

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Kinect Green Screen

Posted on November 29, 2010 by thomaskcarpenter

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.

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