Thinks

3D printer provides woman with a brand new jaw. In this...

Tue, 07 Feb 2012 00:07:43 +0000

3D printer provides woman with a brand new jaw.

In this operation, a 3D printed titanium scaffold was steeped in stem cells and allowed to grow biocompatible tissue inside the abdomen of the recipient. No detail was spared: it even had dimples and cavities that promoted muscle attachment, and sleeves that allowed mandibular nerves to pass through - plus support structures for dental implants the patient might need in future.

Impressive 3D printing!

Contact lenses let you see AR on lightweight glasses, in...

Fri, 03 Feb 2012 15:05:18 +0000

Contact lenses let you see AR on lightweight glasses, in development by Innovega. A ‘special filter’ in the lens enables the eye to focus on projected wide field of view megapixel images projected on the inside of the glass, whilst not impairing your ability to focus on the real world (I think).

(via Viodi)

Augmented reality manikin makes designing clothes easy. The 3D...

Tue, 31 Jan 2012 18:17:00 +0000

Augmented reality manikin makes designing clothes easy.

The 3D tracked manikin and controllers enable the user to cut and shape the design on the manikin whilst previewing it on a screen. I was going to suggest that projecting the result in real-time on the manikin would be good but realised that it would only be useful for fabric on the surface!

The work has been done byAmi Wibowo and three other designers at Igarashi Design Project where they appear to have loads of interesting projects, such as:

Walky - Operating Method for a Bipedal Walking Robot through Personalized Gestures Expression of Fingers
Push-pins - A Tangible Programming Interface Using Physical Tags for Home Automation
RoboJockey - real-time, simultaneous, and continuous creation of robot actions for everyone

(via One Per Cent)

Mass-produced 3D printers about to hit the home market at $1300!...

Fri, 20 Jan 2012 14:55:00 +0000

Mass-produced 3D printers about to hit the home market at $1300! Cubify appear to the the consumer arm of 3DSystems, who also have Botmill with kits and models for the homebrew/enthusiast market, printin3D selling models for the professional market, and Bits from Bytes geared towards the education market.

With Autodesk’s free 123D service that create 3D models from 40 still images the world is now officially printable.

It’s my birthday soon. Hint. Hint.

(via Cube™ - Cubify™)

Is the board and card game industry at a tipping point?

Tue, 13 Dec 2011 23:55:00 +0000

A very readable and most interesting 3-part blog series by Rob Bartel (designer and producer of video games with Electronic Arts’ BioWare) about how the history of board & card games is intertwined with that of video games and what that may mean for the future of the board game industry. He recently branched out into board game design with Two by Two and promotional card games for the sports marketing industry.

The first blog lays the groundwork with a broad history of the video game industry. It covers how video games shifted from being a novelty for adult tinkerers in 1972, to child’s play in 1985, to the genre-driven domain of teenagers in 1991, before finally reaching a tipping point in 2007 where it became a mainstream activity for people of all ages, genders, and backgrounds.
The second blog overlays that analysis with the earlier starting but slower moving history of the board and card game industry and how it has shifted from adult leisure in 1883, to child’s play in 1963, to the genre-driven domain of teenagers in 1974, to where it is today.
The final blog concludes with some bold predictions for where he thinks the board and card game industry is headed, in particular suggesting that the tipping point for board and card games has started in 2011.

Developing board games on the iPad
Some thoughts on the implications of AR for board game play

PS3 Move + camera rig + projection mapping = impressive...

Thu, 08 Dec 2011 14:47:00 +0000

PS3 Move + camera rig + projection mapping = impressive ‘immersive’ promotion for PS’s video store. The irony being that the actor would not feel immersed at all because all they see is a jumble of skewed projections. The three videos were produced by three different directors: (Memo Akten, Barney Steel and Robin McNicholas)

The PS3 Move controller tracks the camera’s position and orientation, which was fitted into an auto-levelling steadicam MK-V-AR rig (video example of use).

Based on my understanding from the explanation by Thomas English (the cameraman) and his scratch reel here’s what’s going on in a nutshell:

The real camera is tracked in studio space and a virtual camera follows it in a wacky virtual 3D space. The view that this virtual camera sees is projected onto a virtual 3D model of the room. Virtual cameras in this space capture what they see (highly perspective-skewed projections that only make sense from the observer’s point of view, just like these 3D illusion pavement drawings) and these are sent to the projectors in the real room. The real camera sees the projections from their intended point of view.

The Move’s 3D tracking is impressive and looks like it could provide a very cheap virtual studio technology.

As an aside, it’s great to see more stuff being projected everywhere, such as on water and on toys. As projectors get smaller and cheaper expect to see more of it embedded in the environment.

(via ElectricTV)

Fashion shop Net-a-Porter.com goes Tesco AR. Well, similar...

Thu, 08 Dec 2011 10:29:00 +0000

Fashion shop Net-a-Porter.com goes Tesco AR. Well, similar principle, enabling customers to interact with the products sold on an on-line store. Here we see an evolution of the Tesco implementation where, for both technical and product/audience reasons, Net-a-porter have used NFT AR where as Tesco used QR codes.

(via NET-A-PORTER: Augmented reality pop-up store fashion app promo | ElectricTV.com)

Toyota’s concept car is a touchsceen and does...

Wed, 07 Dec 2011 13:25:50 +0000

Toyota’s concept car is a touchsceen and does augmented-reality. Cool.

(via Toyota Fun-Vii = Gamers FunCar | Thomas K. Carpenter)

Body swap illusion can transfer you into a Barbie doll using the...

Fri, 02 Dec 2011 13:55:10 +0000

Body swap illusion can transfer you into a Barbie doll using the rubber hand illusion principle (here a description of the sensation)

Could this be the next next big thing for truly immersive gaming? Might have to be floating in a tank in a tactile body suit but I think it would be worth it for the out of body experience.

Interestingly, this research used mirrors to test the effect of remotely viewing the procedure. Although successful, it does not appear to work when the mirror is replaced with a model even though the visual cues are similar. Something to do with mirror cells and our sense of self and/or the fact that some research has shown that it is not dependent on a visual representation. Either way, it looks like this effect could not enable a player to take ownership of a 3rd person game character body. Shame.

(via Karolinska Institute in Sweden virtual reality experiment creates Alice in Wonderland illusion | Mail Online)

Tiny 3D Printed Car! (With Moving Wheels) The Objet Eden 3D...

Thu, 01 Dec 2011 11:53:00 +0000

Tiny 3D Printed Car! (With Moving Wheels)

The Objet Eden 3D printer can deposit two build materials and a removable support at the same time enabling something like this car with functioning wheels and axles to be printed in a single step with no assembly required. 3D printing and 3D scanning is transforming the toy industry.

Read the full blog post for more info and the STL file to print one yourself (or more likely get Industrial Plastic Fabrications to print for you).

Related, Cambridge University have just succeeded in inkjet-printing graphene electronics. Graphene is a wonder material with potentially amazing electrical and structural qualities.

(via ObjetBlog)

iPad measures heart and breathing rates using only...

Wed, 30 Nov 2011 15:41:07 +0000

iPad measures heart and breathing rates using only camera.

Philips Vital Signs Camera app measures fluctuations in skin colour and movement of shoulders to estimate your heart rate and breathing rate. It is impressive that skin colour can be tracked so accurately and quickly. Smartphone and tablet cameras are usually of poor quality (particularly forward facing cameras) so it is a testament to the algorithms that the system appears to work so well. See the review link below where they put it through some paces.

Integrate some of this technology into video conferencing and your tablet will be able to tell you when the person you are talking to is lying or not, or whether you’ve just embarrassed them. This would be useful to add to the extension of SixthSense that designer Timothy Byrne of Western Washington University is working on to provide social cues to suffers of autism.

(via Technology News: Reviews: Philips iPad App Uses Camera to Monitor Your Vitals With Surprising Accuracy)

SpeckleSense is a fast (1000 fps), precise (50 μm), low-cost...

Tue, 29 Nov 2011 16:00:12 +0000

SpeckleSense is a fast (1000 fps), precise (50 μm), low-cost (cheap components and no lenses) and compact motion sensor that exploits ‘Laser Speckle’.

Ever looked at a laser dot and seen a speckle pattern that seems to shift about as you move your head? That’s Laser Speckle. Researchers from Camera Culture Lab have exploited this by re-purposing the tracking sensor from an optical mouse to track the speckle pattern to sense motion in 3D, see the paper for more details.

It’s compact and cheap which means you could have these built into mobile phones extremely cheaply, providing 3D mouse input control for mobile devices.

It has similarities to Kinect technology, i.e. using an optical sensor to analyse a laser pattern project from a similar place. So Kinect on your phone might not be that far away.

(via SpeckleSense: Fast, Precise, Low-cost and Compact Motion Sensing using Laser Speckle)

I was reminded about Bokodes from Camera Culture Lab at an AR...

Tue, 29 Nov 2011 15:21:00 +0000

I was reminded about Bokodes from Camera Culture Lab at an AR talk I gave recently. The system uses a 3mm microdot of tiled fiducial markers and a tiny lens that enables a portion of the markers to be read when the camera lens is focused on infinity.

Pros:

Encode a large amount of information into a tiny space
Pose information can be encoded into the matrix to assist augmented reality
Active and passive types
Do not have to be too close to the item in question

Cons

Two cameras required if you want to do AR
Non-trivial to create (unlike printed codes)
Decent optics required for zoom and wide aperture, maybe?

The current process looks too expensive to be used mass market but maybe a holographic implementation could be the way to exploit this phenomenon much cheaper (by mitmedialab)

[Update] It looks like a a similar technology has been developed in a collaboration between Max Planck Institute for Informatics and MIT Media Lab, Cambridge, Massachusetts a few years. By using an array of these lenses (each one presenting a pixel), hundreds of photos (same object, different views) are compressed into one that changes depending on viewpoint. Here is the article with a video example of a photo with shifting shadow.

Lucky bunny sleeps through first single-pixel wireless contact...

Fri, 25 Nov 2011 16:12:55 +0000

Lucky bunny sleeps through first single-pixel wireless contact lens display prototype tests, bringing retinal AR one pixel closer to reality. The lens is wirelessly controlled over a distance of 2cm (when attached) and uses a Fresnel lens under the LED to focus the light on to the retina. This work was done by a team of researchers at the Parvis Research Group at the University of Washington. The New Scientist article has more information and the original paper is available as a PDF.

(via One Per Cent: Electronic contact lens displays pixels on the eyes)

Visualised data-mining

Thu, 24 Nov 2011 18:02:19 +0000

Researchers for Information Is Beautiful has compiled an infographic for a Wired article that supports the stereotype that Tory governments are made up of public-school boys, whereas Labour governments are made up of grammar-school boys.

Information Is Beautiful really like visualising data and are currently running a contest with a new dataset. It would interesting to see some of these visualisations applied to ScraperWiki. ScraperWiki makes it easier to gather and structure wild data on the web.

(via Infoporn: Yup, Oxbridge is still running the country (Wired UK))

Out Run. Out of the box

Thu, 24 Nov 2011 10:53:00 +0000

The Sega 80’s classic Out Run has had two cross-media implementations recently.

Out Run Analogic

Out Run Analogic is a tabletop analogue version based on the Arduino processor. Packing about as much processing power as the original implementation, you control a physical model over a rolling landscape. It is very similar to the wonderful Mobility Masterclass by Tim Hunkin at the Under The Pier Show in Southwold.

OutRun

OutRun by Garnet Hertzof has gone the other way and put the game into real streets. Image processing analyses the real street ahead and displayers it to the player as game graphics. Obviously, the penalty for crashing in the game has consequences in the real world. Although just for fun, this sort of stuff could be useful in an AR scenario where you would overlay non-visual information such a thermal imaging.

At the moment Garnet Hertzof is working on an augmented reality version doom where the virtual characters mimic the real player using a Kinect.

Immersive video puts you where the camera is. A bit like still...

Wed, 23 Nov 2011 14:59:08 +0000

Immersive video puts you where the camera is.

A bit like still quicktime panoramic photos, the neat use of fish-eye lenses and iPad lets the viewer pan around as the film plays; not dissimilar to an on-rails 3D computer game. Looks like it would be most immersive when using the accelerometer to physically look around.

(via New iPad App Puts Viewers Inside Immersive Video | Raw File)

Clever use of the redundant space that is your laptop lid as a...

Wed, 23 Nov 2011 11:52:00 +0000

Clever use of the redundant space that is your laptop lid as a whiteboard for those coffee-table meetings. Kit available from http://thedrawtop.com/. Use your mobile’s camera and Evernote to capture important scribbles I think you’re onto a winning combination.

(via Turn the top of your laptop into a whiteboard with DrawTop | ZDNet)

Interesting proof of concept for ubiquitous AR. Obviously,...

Wed, 23 Nov 2011 10:33:42 +0000

Interesting proof of concept for ubiquitous AR.

Obviously, we’re not going to be really using pizza boxes as laptops. That’s just silly. And I’m not sure about needing to kit every room out with the technology - I think the more personal approach that Pattie Maes et al are following with SixthSense has the potential for a more ubiquitous and personal augmentation of the world for users.

Nevertheless, some of the technology and concepts demonstrated here relating to supplementing real world objects with artificial affordances would go well with SixthSense.

(via Turn Pizza Boxes Into Computer Interfaces With “Invoked Computing” (Video) | TechCrunch)

Tesco are the first major supermarket in UK to trial AR so that...

Mon, 21 Nov 2011 11:10:00 +0000

Tesco are the first major supermarket in UK to trial AR so that customers can see how big products might be before ordering them. The web cam-based AR developed by KishinoAR works well for toys and items you can hold in your hands but I think furniture items like the TVs (fast forward to 1:35 in the video) are crying out for a mobile AR implementation so you can try them in their intended locations around the house.

(via KishinoAR’s Channel - YouTube)