Immersive Imaging and Seasons Greetings!

Hey everybody!

It has been a while. I hope you enjoyed the ISMAR, its coverage, the pictures (all my pics are now available through ISMAR website) and the time beyond to digest all the cool impressions, ideas and new tech stuff! Being very busy the last weeks, I’d like to close for 2011 with awesome projected AR and some more news pieces! Enjoy!

Immersive Imaging

Coolest videos first! The guys from PlayStation have created a great show to promote their Great Films fill rooms site. A stunning combination of projected AR with a tracked moving steadicam and real props (floating through space). Look close to tell the difference between real and virtual! ;-) Holo deck or matrix… it’s up to you to decide. Enjoy the ride and be sure to follow up with part 2 and 3!

2nd part, 3rd part.

To overcome a fixed observer’s (=camera) position, they attached multiple PlayStation move controller to the camera to track the point of view and to readjust the projected image to keep the illusion. The spatial deformation happens in real-time using multiple DLPs, in-house tools, open Frameworks, OpenCV and other (unnamed) open-source software, rendering with Unity. Anyway, the details don’t matter. The result combining projected imagery with props on wires and prop-ninjas is an awesome techy eyecatcher! :-)

AR Browser World

Wikitude released their brand new developer toolkit to create your AR content. To show us their new tool called “ARchitect” they put up a video and interview, explaning the news to us. The complete written interview with the details was kindly provided to me by the wikitude team. You can download it here. For now you will need an Android phone (ver 2.2) to try it out:

At a similar point in time, metaio now released their completely free mobile SDK. As mentioned before (and announced during their insideAR conference) we can now make us of their toolset to create our own content free of charge (being limited by the feature set or by seeing watermarks). They already include their freshly presented Gravity Aware Feature Descriptors for better mobile tracking and are able to make use of Unity3D for 3D gaming needs.

… and now a happy holiday!

YuleTree X-Mas App

Finally, it’s time for Christmas and green, decorated trees. This year my office is blessed with a real tree, but if you want to take your green decoration into your bath tub or tie it to your dog, you now have almost unlimited possibilities with the nice yuletree app. Just got here in time for the holiday season!

More Christmas AR fun comes from Orange, making you dance with augmented Kings or Santas in your Malls (well, in Paris or Marseille at least). Or otherwise you are already taking part in the present scavenger hunt with your mobile gadget with the junaio AR X-Mas Special as well!

So, enjoy and merry Christmas! Stay tuned for 2012 and have a blast!

Cheers,
TOBY.

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