The gyus from the MIT present a new stunning way to hide markers and barcodes inside tiny pinholes (yes! the small hole next to the old fashioned markers on the left!). When you compare its size with regular markers, it’s pretty amazing and scary, how good they can hide technology to the human eye, but still obtain information visually. A small prism lens is fixed in front of the pattern and an “out-of-focus camera” will deliver the pattern in-focus, inside of the bokeh effect of your lense! It’s damn clever. Their demo for augmented reality tracking works amazingly good. Gotta see it on a field test, though. I guess even for the people at the MIT it’s still pretty hard to track a 12 Megapixel SLR image in real-time and some other restrictions are there (e.g. it’s always more effort and costly to glue a tiny lenslet behind your paperhole – instead of just printing a pattern…) But hopes are up! :-) Be sure to check it out at the Siggraph 09!
See it at youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wG7vXI1I1wg
[...] As the video above shows, there are very nice implications to augmented reality. Aside from coding the identity of the object, it can also encode how’s the object positioned in comparison to your camera. Though, if I understood correctly, the demonstration above uses two cameras, one shooting the object in focus, while the other looks at the Bokode. Another obstacle in the way of wide adoption is that the Bokode currently requires an energy source to operate. Nevertheless, it has already taken a step in the right direction, and currently have a short page on Wikipedia. More information here and here. Via Augmented.org. [...]
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