This is the question Albert Hwang raises in his third part on spatial computing, I wanted to share today.

He continues to nicely discuss the details on possible virtual and mixed reality interaction forms as he did with his first two videos before. The living room feels more like a VR environment (such as a CAVE), but simulated with his (fake) see-through goggles, combining real and virtual.

Interaction is a crucial part for really working mixed reality and is often neglected. People use awkward devices like flysticks, spacemice, etc. often not using the full potential of the human physiognomy: people are seen as one handed, one fingered beings! But we could have much easier interactions, when more of these thoughts – like the ones from Albert – find an open ear.

I especially like the way objects flicker and seem electrically charged when crossing the wall and how he considers security issues like avoiding to bump into the wall, when getting to close, by turning off the VR information in that spot. Easy well thought out ideas with known pinch gestures in three dimensions! Enjoy!

To not forget a brief news flash:

• metaio releases their new version of the mobile SDK, including gravity aligned and feature tracking!
• The AR Summit in London will take place June, 13th! Check their program on augmentedrealitysummit.com.

Hi everybody!

I’m finally back alive after some stressful but interesting cool days! Our big conference is now over with over 900 participants and two days packed with high tech demos, including the AR and mixed reality demos and the talk from Keiichi, Irina from metaio and myself on Augmented visions and current R&D. I guess, it’s a bit difficult to write unbiased on the event myself, but nevertheless I will give a quick overview of the AR related demonstrations we had! (Videos with the demos will be available during the next weeks.)

I’m very happy to get your stories by mail, comments or facebook entries, if you’ve been there and like to add your thoughts! OK, here we go with my favorite four in a short gallery overview style!

Interieur Design with AR

This demo uses a real car as the canvas for 3D augmentations. With marker placements inside the interieur you can customize your car. Place markers to exchange the gear shift, the navigation system, etc. A great way to show how we can easily interact with the computer data within the real space and overlay this with additional information. Customizing and previewing your own version of a product is a big deal and this demo helped to define a possible version of it.

Canon Mixed Reality HMD Demo

We are cooperating with Canon and their R&D to make use of their HMD setups and their own mixed reality tools. The combination of their hard- and software with our 3D renderer shows a very cool way (sorry, I’m biased) of a virtual product (in this case a car) experience. The great thing is, that the stereoscopic video-see-through HMD has a great visual feel when wearing it: Canon has found the right optical lens setup (well, they are Canon) to give you the illusion of actually looking through the video cameras without offsets. Moreover their tracking is pretty robust (markers on the floor plus gyro-sensors within the HMD) and fully real-time responsive. There was no lag at all. Can’t wait to have Canon release their HMD into the wild!

tabletAR with Real-Time Lighting and Reflections

Our developers put up another demo, running finally on an Android Asus Transformer tablet: the virtual car will be rendered on a big workstation and gets reflection, lighting and surrounding information from a connected spherical camera (the Ladybug3). With this combination we are able to get real-time data to work with our renderer: we update reflection, image-based lighting on the go and also add some noise and other filters to have a great match of virtual to real. Finally all gets streamed to a tablet, giving a light-weighted access to the virtual window.

Projection-based Augmented Reality

Last but not least: the demo our team and myself prepared in joint forces with Extend3D. We wanted to take the other way round: to bring the virtual stuff really into the real space to get a haptic feedback and a natural interaction. You wouldn’t need glasses or a tablet at all. The projection based augmented reality has always been one of my favorite approaches, and I’m very glad we could put this up first time for the conference! I’ve been always posting projection mapping videos from around the world, but the difference is: with the integrated tracking we can now easily move the object (here with markers) or also the projection system itself during run-time! Thus we can spin the objects around or move the projector to another side pointing at the real white object – always giving the correct overlay of the 3D information!

We’ve shown two demos here: a 1:18 Camaro model, that changes laquer and turns on and off head-lights, blinker, etc. You could preview your designs, overlay maintenance information, etc. The second demo is an adidas shoe, colored white (with a diffuse finish to get the best reflections in all directions). You can customize the looks in real-time and we hope to see it in stores someday… just put on one dummy show and preview all personalized versions without switching! :-) The best feedback we got was, when people first went passed our booth, thinking “well, there is a colorful shoe on a table, so what?” … when only they realized, that it was projected on! :-)

Well, ok, that’s all for today. I hope I could give a good sneak wrap-up. Hope to get videos online soon!
Allright, see you next time!

PS. If you happen to be in Munich: join us next week Tuesday (8th of May) for our next Stammtisch!

Hey everbody!

Busy days for me. Because next week it’s my company’s conference, the RTT Excite. It’s a two day event Thursday+Friday) in Munich, showing lots of industry VR systems and visualization technologies. The great thing: we will also have lots of mixed and augmented reality demos, ranging from tablet, mobile based systems to workstations with high-end graphics with AR plus a cool new projective Augmented Reality system, I’m currently developing with my colleagues!

Furthermore, I will be holding a workshop session on Augmented Reality on Friday (27th) and we will have a great guest speaker before that session: it’s Keiichi Matsuda talking about his visions on AR (you sure remember Domestic Robocop or AR City 3D). I’m happy that he found the time to join me next week! So, if you are in Munich, Germany, be sure to register for the RTT Excite! Videos to follow afterwards!

Meanwhile…

While waiting, you could check out Mark’s arOCCUPY movement. A new installment comes on May, 1st and hopefully many people will join. You can also get in touch with Mark to get your town listed!

arOCCUPY May Day is a non-violent action meant to send a message to the 1%. The global community will be heard in the heart land of the 1% and maybe in your hometown! Artists and activists from around the world are called to join the arOCCUPATION of May 1st 2012.
Brooklyn based Devotion Gallery will show the AR intervention live, on site in the NYC’s Financial District. Devotion Gallery website here.

If not joining on the street, you might realize how the google project glass future will really look like: the ADmented Reality. :-)

With the claim “We think technology should work for you—to be there when you need it and get out of your way when you don’t.” they start early promoting their possible future product, that would ship glasses like the one shown here and have an Android based OS running behind it. The video below shows an everyday scenario with all marketing essentials (coffee, buddy, girlfriend, sunset). We don’t see a first hardware mockup in action or anything. It stays first-person the whole time. But hey! Nevertheless: a good kick-off. I’m sure we can expect more videos from the big guy during the next year.

We see some scenarios with map services navigation, short messages and speech input. It feels a bit like a teaser not showing anything too crazy. No technology is shown, no real tracking research results. The big news here is only: google is at it! And I guess they will perform well.
Regarding the ideas within concept AR videos, we had funnier and spacier youtube footage before (like Keiichi’s Domestic Robocop or Augmented City I still consider to be under the best AR goggle concept presentations)… But concentrating on major social network generation activities (messaging, foto posting, etc.) this is a convincing and believable start!

Enjoy!

Cheers,
TOBY.

Time to jump into the holiday weekend! Happy seasons greeting for the Easter celibration, where applicable! :-) Hide eggs in the garden, eat that tofu roast and enjoy the speech and show below! Marco Tempest gave this talk and magical demonstration for TED. He tells us a pretty story on what magic is supposed to be, how it works for us and entertains. Illusions to enlight our day. With technology as AR or just with tricks and more imagination. I think it fit’s for the holidays. Enjoy!

Greetings from augmented.org!

- TOBY

So, what does the PS VITA technology called Magnet, do? Basically, it’s a 3D feature tracking technology, that is able to determine your position without the annoying markers or symbol cards, you know from other AR demos (sorry, no hurt feelings: like the Nintendo 3DS).

The tech demos below show off the technology pretty self-explanatory. There is no game to see here, just augmented cubes inside a kitchen, but nevertheless a great step towards more AR to come to mobile devices.

Furthermore they show a cool on-the-fly real-time generation of surface textures, that can be manipulated (a table gets geometrically warped). This all combined with knowledge over your real world space can really make cool AR gaming experiences! That’s why it’s so interesting to see the tech geeks show it already. Because with two big players like Sony and Nintendo working on this topic, we can sure expect more awesome demos to follow! They just know how to make immersive games and stories! :-)

The technology itself has been developed earlier (metaio uses a similar twist for their AugmentedCity) and was shown at ISMAR 2007 by Georg Klein, calling it the PTAM algorithm (“Parallel Tracking and Mapping”). If you are interested in taking a closer look at the technological background, you could either check out the 2011 interview with Georg or check out his blog, directing you to all free download pieces to try it out yourself! I’m just curious on how Sony is going to solve the initialization problem: if you have no marker with a known size, your system won’t easily be able to judge about the scale of your tracked world (e.g. is it a scale world or real 1:1?)…

… otherwise, forget that tech talk and just enjoy the videos below and dream of awesome AR games to come!

Now that google+ gets more and more popular, I’ve wanted to parallel-cross-post all cool AR news in the google universe as well. I thought, I could wait for some fine features first (like a proper URL), but since it’s not gonna happen, I’m not stalling longer and announce it:

Now augmented.org is not only on facebook and twitter, but also on google+! Please encircle augmented.org if you like it and share your own AR news or comments with everyone! I’d like to see you around and get in touch!

Here we go: augmented.org google+ profile

Enjoy!

- TOBY

Holoflector

The “holoflector” is a new concept from Microsoft, that combines the oh-so-great Kinect for an VirtualMirror-AR-experience. Graphics are superimposed correctly on your reflection in a mirror.
Moreover it combines the Kinect tracking with a mobile device (obviously a Windows phone) to get a better accuracy for the small movements through the phone’s gyro. Finally you see graphics hover over your device, floating nicely in your vampire mirror. Or, inverted vampire. ;-) This cool demo was freshly presented at Microsoft TechForum 2012.

Mobile SDKs

Last week, I already mentioned the latest update from metaio, featuring their 3D object tracking technology as shown in the AugmentedCity. This week, to be fair, some further news from the mobile AR field! :-)

Wikitude SDK

Wikitude ships their all new SDK. The ARchitect Engine framework enables you to do some cool new things for your wiki AR platform. Quoting from their press release:

The Wikitude ARchitect Engine is an Augmented Reality JavaScript framework embedded in an HTML web view which sits atop the Wikitude camera view and allows developers to control the objects in the camera view. With the all new Wikitude SDK, this highly efficient Augmented Reality View is now available to integrate into 3rd party apps.

Qualcomm Vuforia

Meanwhile, Qualcomm’s Augmented Reality SDK 1.5 is also now Available for commercial use. They did some big performance improvements with the Vuforia™ Augmented Reality SDK 1.5. Their own video compares the old and the new release and points out the improvements in the tracking:
http://www.qualcomm.eu/partials/video/36785

Some agencies already made good use of the improvements to bring us the x-ray look…

Layar’s Stiktu

To jump to the next mobile AR browser, Layar introduces their new creative tool to generate AR content, called Stiktu. This should serve well to create your own 3D mods to world objects… place your virtual graffiti for everyone to see! Not only in your private channel!

Stiktu How To from Stiktu on Vimeo.

Have a nice weekend to everyone!

to groove into the video weekend some news from the MWC in Barcelona. To start with, IDG has a short introduction report ready for you:

Also present at MWC is – of course – metaio. They present their AugmentedCity in the latest build and demo version. Great news from Peter: metaio will give out their 3D object tracking for free in March – with the mobile SDK 3.1! The interview and ARCity demo in the video below teases us. Let’s go:

Mobile Premier Awards Winner

And last but not least from MWC for now: the winner of the mobile premier awards winner with the best AR app is: “BearCare”! Congratulations to the TagofJoy for winning yet another award with their cute teddy bear.

Ernie and Bert

But to admit… my favorite AR video this week: the children’s App augmenting Sesame Street stars Ernie & Bert and their living room. Cool to see them (the physical dolls) getting overlayed and thus animated nicely! Neat!

That’s all from me today. Over and out! :-)