Thinks

ARGO – Learn Go with AR

Mon, 08 Mar 2010 15:37:48 +0000

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.

Body acoustics can turn your arm into a touchscreen

Wed, 03 Mar 2010 16:33:20 +0000

Body acoustics can turn your arm into a touchscreen

Pawan Sinha on how brains learn to see. Scientific research and...

Wed, 03 Mar 2010 11:03:00 +0000

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)

Head-tracking on the DSi. By visually tracking the eyes the...

Tue, 02 Mar 2010 17:50:35 +0000

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...

Tue, 02 Mar 2010 14:52:00 +0000

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...

Tue, 02 Mar 2010 14:22:40 +0000

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

Tue, 02 Mar 2010 14:08:46 +0000

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”.

Total Immersion demonstrates good use of AR as a controller....

Fri, 26 Feb 2010 11:36:06 +0000

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 FlashLooks like an early test of a...

Fri, 26 Feb 2010 11:17:00 +0000

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...

Fri, 26 Feb 2010 09:56:01 +0000

‘Intelligent’ droplet

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

(via newscientistvideo)

Blaise Aguera y Arcas demos augmented-reality maps The most...

Thu, 25 Feb 2010 14:56:32 +0000

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?)...

Wed, 24 Feb 2010 10:59:01 +0000

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)

The first example of markerless #AR in Flash from Italian-based...

Fri, 19 Feb 2010 13:08:58 +0000

The first example of markerless #AR in Flash from Italian-based company seac02. Looks like it’s going to be an extension of the AR visualisation tools for their LinceoVR 3D visualisation system, which currently consists of binary off-line and plug-in visualisers.

It is great to see examples of Flash AR moving beyond the now-looking-dated AR Toolkit markers!

Boxed AR AR works particularly well when it is framed within...

Fri, 19 Feb 2010 10:01:00 +0000

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...

Thu, 18 Feb 2010 18:26:24 +0000

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)

One of many beautifully rendered images from the Mandelbulb set...

Thu, 18 Feb 2010 11:04:00 +0000

One of many beautifully rendered images from the Mandelbulb set which is a true 3D analogue of the Mandelbrot set rather than a 3D representation (e.g. height elevation) of the 2D Mandelbrot. The article on skytopia has a great explanation of the discovery with images and links to software.

adidas Originals - Augmented Reality Sneaker Experience Using an...

Wed, 17 Feb 2010 11:23:48 +0000

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...

Wed, 17 Feb 2010 10:41:31 +0000

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...

Mon, 15 Feb 2010 11:58:50 +0000

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,...

Fri, 12 Feb 2010 10:37:18 +0000

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.