After we all laughed about the guys from Tonchidot, as mentioned before, there is a new company and new hope around. Even with a nice pun name that does not give you a hard AR headache. Easy to remember and it says what it does: puts a layer on your real world: talking about augmented reality that runs on your mobile device and gives you real-time information about e.g. tourist attractions for now in Amsterdam, or the next coffee shop Starbucks around or your buddy’s location walking one block away… Why it is worth mentioning is the fact, that it runs on all Android phones, will be available free of charge and it allows users and companies to add their own content. If there will be a proper SDK with nice features, I can already smell hundreds of location based fun applications around.
A new game for the Playstation Portable was announced. Using the camera they allow you to see animals appear on your desk and it looks like a beat-em-up multiplayer. Interesting is the use of new interaction paradigms, like blowing (trigger a storm), shaking (earthquake) or shading your animal friends. The only thing I don’t understand is how they want to find invizimals running around in your home - without a placed marker or anything. This just can’t work and sounds like a hyped PR material video, that will never be seen like that at the customer’s. Or at least not yet… The PSP does not bring a full fine grained GPS or similar. How do they want to track the correct position? I doubt that they actually use a fully fleashed feature tracking within the device, just using the medium quality connectable webcam. But besides, a neat vision, that finally looks cool and brings multi-player! Check it out.
As some of you might know, I’m working at the research department for RTT in Munich. So, now it is - for the first time - the moment to show you some work I am doing here.
Finally we finished the pilot of our AR work. Now there is an extension to the real-time high-end visualisation software “DeltaGen” available, that brings you Augmented Reality. So if you are a lucky owner of RTT DeltaGen you can now switch from VR to AR with a single click. DeltaGen is designed for highest possible visual quality in real-time, in our teaser video below you see an Audi R8, done from actual CAD data. No special import/convertion is necessary to show it in AR. Just activate the real world in your computer.
We use a second special fisheye camera to capture the reflection and lighting. All combined in real-time. You might want to use black+white markers or switch to feature based tracking. Feel free to check out our teaser and leave a comment on youtube or here. The pilot is available already and was first presented at the RTT conference in Munich this May. I’m proud of this work and this long project, that finally is ready to hit the market. The big release of the final product is due to this summer. Then you will also see a bigger and longer video, showing all the details. Be prepared! ;-) And now you are the first to see our work in a sneak peak…
I don’t know how many co-workers read my blog, but nevertheless: hey, thanks to everyone, who helped realising this project! Looking forward to get to the next steps in pushing AR realism to the next level!
The guys from easyweb.fr have a nice showreel online on their website (see below at youtube). It’s pretty impressive projection technology, where blinken lights only began, these guys continue with spatial augmented reality. The projections fits the real geometry and architecture. Take a 3D model of your to-project-to-surface and connect a badd-ass beamer that sports enough ansi lumen… Take a look! Not much to explain, but impressive to see (even better in real life).
PS. Sorry, we had some server maintenance that took quite a while.
No, this won’t be about violent computer games. I guess it’s more a summer gap issue, but a nice new demo can be seen on the assassin’s creed 2 website. It’s a 3rd person jump-and-sneak 3D game (if you don’t know the first one). Once you’ve seen the trailer you can get to an AR demo: the left button brings up a new website with another AR solution embedded in flash. A printed marker (or displayed on an iphone) will reveal first items from the game in 3D floating in your hand. It’s nice to see more and more AR applications that can run natively (well, Flash…) in your browser without any installs. So, let’s hope for more things to come that bring us hardware accelleration for browsers, like googles O3D.
A cool demonstrator from beyond reality was shown at the Game Developer Conference. It’s the classic slot car game you’d setup in your children’s room. But this one avoids missing track pieces or monotony. Cool graphics and features, triggered by putting down additional cards, bring extra fun. So far so good. But then again: how to actually use the great game? How to interact? If you put up a camera on your desk and then look to your screen… it’s like playing a VR video game… well, it is on your desk, but no big advantage (only real advantage: to put down extra cards easily). Disadvantage as always: you have to look towards your PC screen instead of looking towards the table. Companies like vuzix, please hurry up with your AR-add-ons!
Otherwise, it’s the best AR game effort I’ve seen in a long while. (For the graphics and the soundtrack!) Take a look!
This year’s International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality will be held in Orlando, Florida! Check out their fresh website to get the latest information on augmented reality. If you are a researcher or want to be become one, check out the call for participation section and submit your papers and results! Ori from gamesalfresco will be there and keep you uptodate, I’m sure. But until then: sumbit your work and take your time to book your flights to the sunny state, that not only hosts senor citizens but also the latest cutting edge-technology!
This is finally a really new use case. Fraunhofer researchers from FIT have developed an augmented reality application for scuba divers! Here you will see a fancy beautiful fauna and flora, where actually only lie old oil cans and old ship wrecks on the ground of the sea. A game is always only the first application, let’s see where it goes!
After several automotive AR demos to download (Mini, Toyota IQ, …) there is a new buddy queueing for attention. Topps Sports Cards offers augmentation for baseball trading cards! There have been different attempts (also AR already) to pimp up old dusty card games, this one is another example for “wow-effect without a cause”. It could get interesting when you could play baseball with the appearing figures on your desktop… Place them in positions and trigger a game… but the way it works right now it’s just simple plain boring independent animations of player’s figures… Let’s hope for more, though! Done by our French AR fellows from T-Immersion.
Wired posted a blog article about MIT guys, playing around with projected AR again. They use a pocket projector to do the augmentation right where it belongs: on the surface or object it is connected to. This has the advantage of not having to wear ugly HMDs or glasses, but of course has its drawbacks: bad image quality (too dark/fuzzy surface to project to, too bright surrounding, scewed surfaces, etc.) and privacy will be another issue: the augmentation is there for everybody! Delightful or disturbing… depends. But take a glimpse at their work to get inspired, too! Thinking about undistortion of projector images or color calibration it’s worth to take a look at the work from Oliver Bimber again.
