augmented.org

The people from Georgia Tech made a nice demo using the iPhone and releasing a virtual dog into your living room. You can pet him and feed him. Unfortuantelly now everybody is waiting for the iPhone to open up its SDK for (video) camera access. Until now no AR video games can be uploaded to the iTunes store. What a shame! Apple, please be gentle and lower your restrictions! :-)

The demo itself is neat and cute and a nice concept is to bring in new markers during runtime to raise the elbowroom of your AR pet. If you throw in a 2nd marker, the 1st has to be in sight, too, to calculate the reference. From that moment on you can move easily wihout calibration. Moreover there is nothing spectacular technologywise, but it’s another proof that AR is hitting main stream! Please, Apple, please, open up! :-)

A nice report on “how does the yellow line appear on football fields in TV” is shown below at FANDOME. The company doing it is called SportsMedia. They use a combination of tracking systems, pipe it through the camera’s 2nd audio channel to their computers and have two operators for adjusting the line’s position and controlling the chroma keying for the players above the green field. This is not new of course, but I like the insight into their software and the presentation. Enjoy! Kick off!

Hi all,

happy new year! Let’s see what 2009 can do for us and our augmented reality expectations. The newest piece of gadgetymagics is the Wrap 920AV from Vuzix. These see-through glasses promise a 60 inch screen experience (from 9 feet distance) and come with stereo sound in a sporty <3 ounces… Unfortunatelly the website does not reveal how we connect our devices to it or how long the two AA batteries will last. But its giving high hopes, especially since there is add-on equipment planned, such as a 6 DOF tracker (clip-on) and stereo-USB-cameras for your full AR-setup… Sounds too good to ship 2009…