Thinks

Blaise Aguera y Arcas demos augmented-reality maps

The most impressive bit is where the live video image is mapped in real-time to the interior of the market. Well, that’s what it looks like but unfortunately Blaise did not finish what he was saying on this.

(on TED.com)

Augmented (hyper)Reality: Domestic Robocop

A (possibly cynical?) view of the future of advertising in an AR age.

“The latter half of the 20th century saw the built environment merged with media space, and architecture taking on new roles related to branding, image and consumerism. Augmented reality may recontextualise the functions of consumerism and architecture, and change in the way in which we operate within it.

A film produced for [Keiichi Matsuda’s] final year Masters in Architecture, part of a larger project about the social and architectural consequences of new media and augmented reality.”

(via Vimeo)

Boxed AR

AR works particularly well when it is framed within something in the real world. This example developed by Dassault Systemes puts a game into a cereal box and uses tilting as the control mechanism. The little bits of AR that come out of the box are made more believable because the distinction between real and virtual has been blurred so well. Another excellent example is levelhead.

This demo shows the Metaio Unifeye Mobile SDK performing markerless tracking on a Samsung i8910 mobile. AFAIK this is the fastest S60 5th Edition phone, with the same 600 MHz ARM Cortex-A8 CPU as the iPhone 3GS and the Nokia N900.

(via Games Alfresco)

adidas Originals - Augmented Reality Sneaker Experience

Using an AR marker as a controller as a motion-controller is a Good Thing. Using your shoe as a controller is not. Maybe having a large black and white ARToolkit marker on your trainer could be trendy. In a retro kind of way.

If you want to see clothes with AR done well then take a look at the clever stuff Brights and Stripes do using Flash.

(via agoramedia)

This Digital Graffiti Wall from Canadian-based Tangible Interaction provides stencils which is a neat idea. They were commissioned to produce one for the 2010 Olympic Winter Village. It’s written in C++ using openFrameworks, a framework library for creative experimentation (maybe a little like processing?).

Off-the-shelf camera hacked to grab high-speed video.

Temporal Pixel Multiplexing sends each frame to a different set or pixels on a large sensor using a chip of mirrors, enabling high-resolution images to be reconstructed from frames. This approach is a lot cheaper than professional high-speed cameras. There are more details here.

A simpler, portable, out-of-the-box (but more constrained) solution could be a Casio EX-F1 consumer digital camera for ~£500. These can shoot up to 512 × 384 (300 fps), 432 × 192 (600 fps), 336 × 96 (1200 fps). Newer Casio models can also do high-speed but at lower resolutions. There are lots of high-speed examples of the EX-F1 on youtube, and a good 300fps one below.

New York 2008 from Vicente Sahuc and Sara Fernandez on Vimeo.

(via New Scientist)

Space-Distorting Augmented Reality concepts XrayVision, MeltVision and DistortVision being researched by Magic Vision Lab display AR information that is either outside the user’s field of view or occluded by real-world objects. I can see how the x-ray and melt vision could be useful in a Layar-type context but the distort vision seems to defeat the purpose of using a mobile viewer.

The Magic Vision Lab are part of the ACRC and the School of Computer and Information Science at the University of South Australia.