Weekly Linkfest

Posted on July 31, 2011 by rouli

Slow week, or am I at fault for not paying attention to the augmentosphere?

This week’s video is without a doubt this one from The Heavy Projects – I never got so many retweets as I did after tweeting about it (if you don’t follow me I’m @augmented). Harnessing the power of Junaio, the billboards of Times Square are repainted with original street art. I think the guys from Artvertiser had this idea first, but it’s pretty neat to see it actually implemented. I just wonder whether it’s ok with Junaio’s terms of use.

Have a great week!

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Hyper(reality) – Who Needs Eyes When Kinect is Around

Posted on July 21, 2011 by rouli

Imagine for a moment how would it be like to replace your sense of vision with the point cloud generated by Kinect, which in turn is controlled by your arduino glove. Thanks to designer Maxence Parache you don’t need to imagine such a scenario anymore

Hyper(reality) – The Last Tuesday Society from Maxence on Vimeo.

I’m not sure if this project can be catalogued as augmented reality, and if so, it is surely on the fringes of AR (since it seems to me to increase the latency between atoms and bits). Is the term alternative reality taken yet?

via Yanko Design (where you can see some more videos)

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Raving Rabbids Alive & Kicking (Some AR)

Posted on June 6, 2011 by thomaskcarpenter

Yes, I still exist.  Sorry, I’ve been out of the country for the last few weeks.  But my travels did give me a glimpse into a fantastic game sporting the A and the R — Raving Rabbids.  If you’re not familiar with the series, Raving Rabbids are the insanity pills of the gaming industry.  Nothing like jerking your carrot juice in front of a bar full of people, laughing and pointing the whole time (yes, this is a game, not an obscene act.)

The game is for the Microsoft Kinect only and utilizes the characters to immerse you into their insanity.  What I love about the Rabbids and AR is that it gets you out of the gimmick and into AR.  Right now what holds most applications of AR back is that they’re focused on the trick and not telling a good story.  Rabbids are weird and at times, unexplainable, but playing their games helps you forget there’s a thing called AR at all.  And that’s a good thing.

Looking forward to when this game comes out.

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Virtual Fitting Room for Topshop

Posted on May 10, 2011 by thomaskcarpenter

** Nice to see the Kinect out in the working world, rather than just slaving away in hacker space.  The video is instructive as it shows real customers using the product.  Personally, I wouldn’t look good in any of those dresses, but that’s just me.  *cough*

Virtual Fitting Room for Topshop

AR Door, a Russian agency specialized in Augmented Reality solutions, teamed up with Topshop, a woman and man clothes retailer, to create a virtual fitting room for a new collection of dresses Dress up.

A special kiosk for the fitting room was installed at the flagman Topshop store in Moscow at the shopping centre European, 5-8 May 2011.

The virtual fitting room is built on the most sophisticated technologies: augmented reality and Microsoft Kinect. Augmented reality allows the customers to select a garment off the rack without having to try it on physically.  As a customer, you see yourself onscreen with a 3D copy of a dress. Kinect allows the user to control the program by simple gestures pushing virtual buttons right in the air.

To activate the program you don’t need special markers: the built-in camera tracks a person’s body and superimposes over it a 3D model of the dress.

A unique feature that allows the customers to watch both the front and the back parts of the dress was deployed in the Topshop fitting room for the first time in the world practice.

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Mirage HMD Augmented Reality System

Posted on March 15, 2011 by thomaskcarpenter

The HMDs are here!

The HMDs are here!

Okay, maybe it’s not that exciting, especially when you realize that the Mirage from Arcane Technologies is not a stylish pair of glasses or even some retro steampunk goggles outfitted with AR HMD gear.  The unit looks so bulky and bland that not even Lady Gaga could make it trendy.

But it IS an AR HMD.

But really it’s made for industrial usage and not everyday street wear.  Though I suppose, a truly hardcore AR enthusiast could augment their home and wear them safety inside without worrying about losing a chance to ever have another date.  Again.  Ever.

The Mirage TM Augmented Reality System is a complete solution allowing you to create your own AR experience by inserting virtual content into the real environment. It includes a high-end stereoscopic OLED video see-through HMD and the MirageBuilder TM AR authoring software that work together to track different targets and display overlay near or onto them. The stereoscopic display allows the user to perceive depths for the most realistic experience and OLED technology offers the best color image quality available in head mounted displays today.

The Mirage TM HMD includes two cameras that are placed in front of the OLED ocular displays. The cameras send the images of the surroundings to the attached computer and the software uses image processing algorithms to detect marker patterns in the image. If one or more marker patterns are detected, those patterns are used to compute the 3D pose of the associated contents and then the overlay is drawn over the camera images for both eyes. The images are then sent back to the OLED ocular displays in front of both eyes. The result is a highly realistic and accurate stereoscopic realtime AR experience !

The system comes with authoring software so you can customize your markers.  I’d be curious if you could also use third party software like the Kinect to make it even groovier.  The Mirage + Kinect could become quite an indie hardcore hit.  However, since they don’t list the price on their website, I assume the cost is greater than even the most hardcore could afford.

Still, it IS another AR HMD on the market and to me we’re another step closer to stylish low-cost AR HMDs.  I’m still predicting 2015 as my arrival date for said glasses, but hopefully someone will surprise me and deliver a product sooner.

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Ninja Attack!

Posted on March 6, 2011 by thomaskcarpenter

In my dream world, the Kinect system wouldn’t be tethered to the XBox 360.  Instead, it would hook to the TV and have an extensive app library like the iPhone.

Sweet spot around 1:25 for a ninja vanish move.  The Kinect makes invisibility so easy, it’s mind-boggling.

And better work on your arm endurance.

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Weekly Augmented Reality Linkfest

Posted on March 6, 2011 by rouli

This tradition cannot be stopped, here’s another weekly linkfest:

This week’s video comes from Robert Scoble’s tour in SRI International, showing a handbag buying application, using Kinect to make it seem like a real handbag is actually dangling from the lady’s arm. See more videos, including one aboud head mounted display based AR gaming, in this post, titled “A Look At How SRI Is Augmenting The Human Condition“:

Have a great week!

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Reality, Now With More POW!

Posted on March 1, 2011 by thomaskcarpenter

If global conflicts could add a little more Batman style POW! to their arsenal, we might not actually have so much conflict.

Oh yeah, and it’s a Kinect video.

Comic Kinect: for all those who wish life was a comic book from Maya Irvine on Vimeo.

Read more about it!

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Weekly Revolutionary Linkfest

Posted on January 30, 2011 by rouli

A bit of a busy week, here are just some of the augmented reality stories that happened in the past seven days:

Sometimes, you don’t need enticing narrative to create a touching AR application. “Jack in the box” by the Spanish company Sensaa is an evidence to that. Just open a box, and an augmented surprise will pop out of it. Simple, but wonderful:

Have a great week!

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5 Things I Want Kinect To Do

Posted on January 27, 2011 by thomaskcarpenter

The Kinect has become an indie revolution, open sourced and hacked to provide a wealth of effects we haven’t had access to for augmented reality.  The Kinect Hacks site is doing a terrific job covering the revolution, but I want to make my bid for what I want the Kinect to do outside its comfort zone.

The Kinect so far has been wedded to the TV, mostly because it’s a gaming device.  But the company behind the technology, PrimeSense, recently raised $50 million.  We can only suspect they’re going to turn their hot new commodity into a device that can work with more than just the PC or an Xbox.

When that product hits the market, understanding the world will be much easier for computers and therefore, will make augmented reality more advanced.  Now I know most of these ideas aren’t AR in the strictest terms (I know my friend Rouli wouldn’t deem them AR,) but they exist in the same spectrum and they’re important for the overall development of the technology.  Without better sensors, AR is doomed to stay stuck in the smartphone.  Plus, sensing the world is one-half the AR equation (see the RIM scale for more details.)

Here are five things I want the Kinect to do:

1) I want the Kinect to drive my car, at least on the highway, while I’m busy doing something else.  Google wants to do the same thing and I think the Kinect could help them.
2) Conveyance in a factory setting takes a lot of manpower and is woefully wasteful.  Utilizing cheap sensors that can see people and sense their environment would make getting widgets from one place to another easy.
3) Mapping indoor locations would allow building AR environments in your local Walmart so mapping out your shopping route can be done with a simple app.
4) Telepresence robot, 3D glasses, and a computer screen could give people with massive physical disabilities a way to explore the world around them.
5) Sensing system for the blind that could give them clues to what was happening around them.  The system could use facial recognition and whisper what it saw in your ear.

These are just a few possibilities with the Kinect sensor as it gives computers a window into our world.

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