Great news, everyone!

… we are getting closer to real feature based 3D AR tracking (without the ugly markers)! – Even for mobile devices now. Also, we have lots of cool new demos below!! But, back to #1 prio for now – the feature tracking: on the one hand it is a question of CPU power of our (pocket) computers, but on the other still a lot about brain juice from great researchers around the globe improving the algorithms. Below you’ll see my this weeks highlight coming from metaio, bringing us their iphone 4 based 3D feature tracking demo. (via their blog) The example gives us virtual service instructions of a printer embedded into the live video:

They will be hopefully presenting the demo during the upcoming mobileworldcongress in Barcelona. This year from February, 14th to 17th. The conference also has two special talks dedicated to AR:

Currently scheduled for Tuesday (4pm) AR – Is Reality ready to be augmented? they discuss whether location based services are better off without or with AR – maybe with another interaction paradigm still missing? Is the hardware ready and who will -if- be the first to make the break-through?

The second session is on Wednesday at 2pm, titled Mobile Innovation: a Vision of 2020. I’ll just quote it:

Back by popular demand, this visionary session will once again provide an insight into the mobile society and what it will provide in the future. This demo-rich session will highlight the trends set to
transform the way we will communicate over the next 10 years, covering augmented reality, 3D devices, display technologies and more.

Let’s see!

feature based 3D #2

Also putting his efforts into the feature tracking with SLAM algorithm is Jairo from Vicomtech (greetings to the fellows of my ex-company! :-)) His demo video on youtube shows us his approach, working with CUDA for parallelism and real-time efficiency. Quoting: Both tracking and reconstruction are done using a particle filtering framework. This video has been recorded with a 320×240 camera, no markers are used and the 3D structure is unknown a priori.

feature tracking #3

Here comes another feature tracking demo on maintenance using the Vuzix HMD!

More fun with the Kinect

kinect ar physics demo:
LABSID (a company born from Polytec U in Barcelona) gives us a nice combination of depth sensing Kinect with AR plus physics (based on nVidias physX):

Meanwhile, the computer graphics group in Erlangen, Germany, presents their 3D-face scanner using the Kinect. One day, we’ll have it all combined and play in AR with gestures and Avatars who mimic us completly…

What else?

If you’ve missed the Digital Life Design conference in Munich you can have the 30 minutes video from the AR panel right here.

Also waiting for the results on the Qualcomm 2010 AR Challenge? To recall: Developers from around the world participated in Qualcomm’s 2010 Augmented Reality (AR) Developer Challenge and created rich AR experiences including interactive games, educational applications, and marketing concepts. These apps use Qualcomm’s AR platform, which includes the AR SDK for Android and the AR Extension for Unity. They tease us for the results with this new video. Winner will be announced on February, 15th.

… and what about games?

Great! Love the idea! Students from technical university (TU) München have been playing Who am I? too often, I guess. One night they didn’t take a post-it, but rather markers… and now we have a fully-fledged Android AR party game, as it seems! Are you reading this, TU München researchers? Please bring it along to the next AR Stammtisch (regulars table) on March, 1st! :-) ‘d love to play it! ;-)

Enjoy the weekend!

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