Thinks

A stream of links and notes and pictures and articles on new technology, augmented reality, new media, cross-media, TV, mobile, Internet, artificial life, digital entertainment, social networking, inspiring art. That sort of cool stuff.

2ne1.com

Archive

Mar
8th

Mon

ARGO – Learn Go with AR

With neat use of Go stones for the options selections. I’d like to see this as a AR-based mobile app.

Mar
3rd

Wed

Body acoustics can turn your arm into a touchscreen

Pawan Sinha on how brains learn to see. Scientific research and humanitarian work at the Prakash project has identified motion as being key to image segmentation. MIT are developing the ‘Dylan’ system based on these findings, which is a self-organising computational model that uses motion to perform object recognition. There is some information on research here, but the only pages relating to Dylan is MIT’s Dylan programming language

(via TED.com)

Mar
2nd

Tue

Head-tracking on the DSi.

By visually tracking the eyes the perspective is shifted to match the viewing angle. This is the first time I’ve seen head tracking implemented on the DSi. This implementation is particularly elegant, providing a very personal view into a little 3D world.

Also take a look at this example for a mobile phone user interface (along with other design concepts) and the infamous demonstration by Johnny Chung on a PC using a Wii remote.

Augmented Reality ‘Game’ Example

It looks like this is calculating 3D occlusion in real-time which is impressive. The registration look good. Too good. But at the same time it doesn’t look like it has been faked. It was shown at a 2008 event hosted by TECHNOLOGIES, a journal for the hi-tech industries in Israel. 28% of the journal is distributed to the military sector so maybe it has come from there.

(via GamesAlfresco)

Dell Tablet Mini 5 for Augmented Reality?

This Android device with a five inch touchscreen has both front and user facing cameras allowing full augmented reality capabilities. With WiFi and 3G connectivity, accelerometers, GPS and a 1.0 GHz Snapdragon Qualcomm processor, the Mini 5 should have enough grunt for some decent AR apps.

(Games Alfresco)

Google now owns location advertising • The Register

The US patent, which was filed in 2004 and awarded last week (and spotted by Venture Beat), covers “determining and/or using location information in an ad system”.

Feb
26th

Fri

Total Immersion demonstrates good use of AR as a controller. Note that when you have your camera view in the background you have to switch around the movement so that essentially the camera is moving backwards through the virtual environment. This is opposite to direction that conventional 1st-person games move through 3D environments and it limits how far ahead you can see.

Augmented Reality Blog

LISA - virtual mirror in Flash
Looks like an early test of a Flash-based virtual mirror by Tastenkunst that lets you try on glasses.

A slow frame-rate here but looks promising largely because it does not require an exe like the ray-ban’s virtual mirror developed by FittingBox and requires user to select tracking points (watch).

Nor does it require a separate browser plug-in like the ATOL opticians virtual mirror developed by Total-Immersion. A plug-in is particularly frustrating because after downloading the installer you have to close all your tabs, run the installer, restart your browser and then navigate all the way back to the AR app. How unfriendly?

‘Intelligent’ droplet

This amused me because it’s essentially the same way Norns navigate in Creatures 3, by travelling up smell gradients.

(via newscientistvideo)