Archive for category AR Games
Vuzix Wrap 920AR Video Eyewear at CES 2010
Posted by Tom Carpenter in AR Games, augmented reality on January 9th, 2010
The Vuzix Wrap 920AR aren’t the sexiest of specs, but they do perform the function of AR glasses. I got a chance to see this setup at ISMAR09 which they’re now showing at CES 2010.
The specs for the glasses look like:
The stereo camera pair delivers a single 1504 x 480 side-by-side image that can be viewed in 3D stereoscopic video, while the video eyewear provides an unprecedented 67-inch display as seen from 10 feet. The Wrap 920AR also includes a 6 Degree-of-Freedom Tracker, which allows for absolute accuracy of roll pitch and yaw and also X, Y and Z positioning in 3D space
Vuzix Wrap 920AR Specifications:
• 1/3-inch wide VGA Digital Image Sensor
• Resolution: 752H x 480W
• Includes 6 Degree-of-Freedom Tracker
• Frame rate: 60 fps
• Dynamic range: >55dB linear; >80-100dB in HiDy mode
• Shutter efficiency: >99%
• ADC Resolution: 10-bit column parallel
• High-speed USB 2.0
• PC and Mac compatible
• System requirements: Windows XP SP2, Windows Vista, Windows7, Mac OS X 10.4.9 or higher
• MSRP: $799.99
They probably won’t be worn in public anytime soon, but some creative programmers could create interesting house-only interactive avatars or AR spaces. While some might scoff at this idea, see this video from Georgia Tech last year to see how even semi-cheesy graphics can make augmented reality immersive. Having played the old VR game Dactyl Nightmare in the 1990s, the head-tracking really creates the illusion of reality.
We haven’t seen any developers put together a product that takes advantage of these $800 glasses, but hopes are that exposure at CES 2010 will bring more interest. The only thing I’ve seen using the setup is the Whisper Deck from Craig Kapp. Maybe later this year we might see some products that would entice the hard core AR enthusiast to fork out the cash for these un-sexy specs.
Popularity: 23% [?]
Augmented Reality Year in Review – 2009
Posted by Tom Carpenter in AR Games, Industrial AR, augmented reality on December 27th, 2009
The year 2009 has been an important milestone in the development of augmented reality as an important future technology. While markers and marketing campaigns captured the early interest of the year, the bigger story was the porting of augmented reality to the various smartphones in the second half.
But those two generalities aren’t the only thing that happened in 2009 in regards to augmented reality. I’m going to take a look back at the year, month-by-month, to remember how the year unfolded, so we better understand the direction of the future.
January
Back at the dawn of 2009, all the augmented reality news you needed to know was in one place – Games Alfresco. Hope was high and all the pieces seemed to be clicking into place.
Biggest News of the Month – Metaio releases its Lego AR boxes
* By a long shot, Metaio’s release of the augmented reality Lego box was the biggest news of the month. When you can get Angela Merkel and the Govenator to pose with your product, you’re doing well.
Coolest App/Video – iPhone App Helps Solve Rubix Cube
* This app portents of things to come in the future as products like Google Goggles amp up the possibilities of reality-search. Using specific algorithms (agents) for specific tasks, there will be an app for everything you want to do in the future.
Best Article / Interview – UgoTrade Interview with Robert Rice
* Though Robert hasn’t delivered on his promise of a Neogence product by mid-year (though the Apple video API has stymied their progress), the rest of the interview is full of great quotes and nuggets about augmented reality.
* Notable quotes from Robert that show how much he understands the industry:
But yes, I’d say that the next 18 months are going to be very interesting with a lot of money being thrown around, new ventures, and plenty of content/applications. I expect most of this will be centered on single user AR experienced through a mobile device with a screen (iPhone, android, etc.). I expect that there will be a significant boost after Vuzix releases some of their wearable *transparent* displays, putting Microvision back into the “has potential but is too quiet” position.
Remember, one of the biggest risks that AR has, is being branded as “novelty”, which means “cool for five minutes but ultimately a waste of time.” I think we have a ways to go before something is truly useful, but as 2009 progresses we should start seeing some effort here. I’d guess 2010 before something really useful comes out…at least something practical.
Now, having said that, I should say that I expect entertainment and games to take the lead (as usual), although there are a few companies really trying to leverage AR and video/graphics compositing for marketing (brochures) and location based methods (kiosks, large screen projections, etc.)
Other notable things that happened in January – The Augmented Times is born and Rouli Nir begins a great year of chronicling the happenings of AR.
An auspicious quote from Rouli:
This blog is about Augmented Reality (AR). It is my firm belief that AR will be the next web revolution (the so called Web 3.0, and forget about that semantic web nonsense). In the next few years, stronger devices and better algorithms will enable us to merge the real world with cyberspace. Using your mobile phone (at first) or head up display (later on) every real object will be augmented and achieve a web presence. Tourism, shopping, advertisement, entertainment and education are only a few areas that will never be the same.
This blog mission is to document this revolution as it happens. We welcome you, and welcome our augmented future.
February
This month is relatively quiet due to it being handicapped by fewer days than the other months.
Biggest News of the Month – Augmented Reality in Flash Now Commercially Available.
* Making the nuts-and-bolts tools of AR available for commercial use is always a good thing, especially when its paired with flash.
Coolest App / Video – “Sixth Sense” MIT Device.
* Patty Maes unleashed this phenomenon on the web early last year and it still gets links and mentions today. While projection based AR is probably not medium that we’ll all eventually use, the video showed tangible use-cases that help the non-initiated understand the embryonic technology.
Best Article / Interview – This comic from the Abstruse Goose sums up a lot about the future of ubiquitous computing (via Augmented Blog.)
Other notable things that happened in February- I started the Future Digital Life blog, which upon reading my early posts, makes me cringe a little. Oh well, nothing ventured, nothing gained. Also, Rouli starts the Weekly Linkfest, the best place to find the round up of AR news each week.
March
In like a lion, out like a lamb. Augmented reality starts to get rolling in March with lots of goodies and promises.
Biggest News of the Month – Metaio and Vuzix Team Up to Create AR Goggles.
* While the year has been mostly disappointing regarding HMDs, this was the one tangible piece of progress in the bunch. The video Ori captured at the GDC portends to greater things. While no companies have released products for the Vuzix+ARCam, we’ve recently seen an impressive project from Craig Kapp with his Whisper Deck.
Coolest App / Video – Blair MacIntryre’s GA Tech team – Zombie Attack and Pit Strategy.
* The videos showed what polished AR games can look like.
Best Article / Interview – I’m going for a two-fer on this one because its hard to choose between Ori’s talk at WARM09 and Robert’s Decade of Ubiquity post.
* If you haven’t watched Ori’s talk, I highly recommend it. Even though I’d seen the video, I made a point of hearing him live at ISMAR09 because I think its such a well thought-out call for human-based technology. Robert’s vision is a bit more expansive and covers the whole of augmented reality. I’ll leave you with another Robert quote:
We will break away from the desk, we will throw away our monitors, and our children will laugh at how large our IPhones are. They will struggle with how we ever managed to get work done with “windows” “webpages” and keyboards. They will be unable to fathom the concept of vinyl disks, typewriters, and landlines. But it all starts, and accelerates, during this next decade. Imagine everything that happened in the last decade, and multiply it. You haven’t seen anything yet. The next decade will make the last one pale in comparison.
Other notable things that happened in March – Topps released augmented baseball cards and ISMAR09 begins calling for papers.
April
Biggest News of the Month- Rouli and Ori team up on Games Alfresco to create the AR hub for all AR related news.
* The move allowed Ori to focus more on his company and gave Rouli the helm on the daily AR newscasting. Looking back at the great job that GA has done, I’d say it was a good move.
Coolest App / Video – Marco Tempest’s AR card trick video.
* The video hit the web in April and showed us how AR can change our perception of reality.
Best Article / Interview – Tim O’Reilly talks Web 2.0
* Augmented Times identified the best quote from the video:
RFID is an evolutionary dead-end … semantic web or RFID is things “wearing name-tags”, and web 2.0 is learning to recognize things … We’re getting to that kind of augmented reality, where our computers will have senses that are as good as ours or better … they are going to recognize faces, they are going to recognize objects, they gonna have immediate recall. If you ask me “what’s the UI in five years”, it’s a pair of glasses … I’m gonna have some kind of little heads up display because I’m gonna look at something, I’m gonna walk around at a meeting and it will go “that’s Joe, you met him three years ago”.
Other notable things that happened in April – Georgia Tech fear of heights video (another peak into the future of augmented reality as a perception changer), Rouli’s call for marketers to stop using AR to sell cars, Lester at the Augmented Planet gets his blog started, Nokia point and find is out and a couple of articles about brain-computer interfaces: Honda controls robot and the brain-twitter breakthrough.
May
Biggest News of the Month – Metaio releases Unifeye design demo.
Coolest App / Video – Useful AR from the US Postal Service.
* Using FLARToolkit, the US postal service shows us that not all AR applications have to be novelity ones.
Best Article / Interview – Tish interviews Ori Inbar about mobile augmented reality.
Ori: Just like with every emerging technology in history, people never bought the technology, they bought the content, the apps, the benefits that came on top of the technology. Whether it was VHS winning over Beta Max, or BluRay winning over HD. It’s always because of more/better content. Look at the video game console war: Xbox, and Nintendo did better than Sony just because they had more and better games. Even Windows was a success thanks to its applications. People bought it for the applications not the OS. The content is the first to drive demand.
Other notable things that happened in May – My post about the Path to Augmented Vision, Programmer Joe talks AR at LOGIN, and 11 Industries to be Reinvented with Augmented Reality.
June
Biggest News of the Month – Layar is online.
* The biggest news of the month by far. Layar was the first big product release that got a buzz bump.
Coolest App / Video – Zugara Social Shopper.
* The video showcased the use of motion capture to help eliminate the burdensome need for keyboards and mouses when you’re using augmented reality. Zugara later put the technique into practice for their Cannonballz and Fashionista products.
Best Article / Interview – UgoTrade Interview with Blair MacIntyre
* No surprise here. Tish Shute continues to get great interviews with everyone important in the AR field.
The problem with the mobile phone as a AR device is that problem of awareness. If I have a head mount on and I walk down the street and there is bunch of probably-not-useful-but-potentially-useful information floating by me, that’s a good thing, because I may see something that is useful or makes me think of something else. But if I have to hold up my phone to see if something might be interesting nearby, I will never hold up my phone because at the time there is a high probability that there won’t be anything particularly important there. You might imagine you can get around this by using alerts or something like that, but then you overload whatever alert channel you use.
Other notable things that happened in June- Ori asks us all about our favorite AR games of all time, Noah breaks onto the scene with his Touchless Glove Interface, and Goggle presents their paper on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (which later becomes Goggles).
July
Biggest News of the Month – The AR Consortium Announced.
* While its still unknown if the consortium has accomplished anything through cooperation, the intention of cooperation is a start. Here’s to hoping we’ll see more fruit from this vine in 2010.
Coolest App / Video – AcrossAir Tube Finder.
* At the time it was released we weren’t sure if it was a real product, but eventually we learned the truth and for a time, AcrossAir became the top selling AR app on the iPhone appstore.
Best Article / Interview – UgoTrade Interview with Ori Inbar “Reality Reinvented”
Ori:You are so right. It’s multiple elements in the industry that have to come together. You have the technology companies like Imagination and Metaio, then you have content companies like what we’re trying to do; the hardware vendors and the large content providers. Those brands that we’re trying to go after and educate them about the potential of AR. All these pieces need to come together for this market to ignite.
Other notable things that happened in July – James Alliban’s business card goes viral and AR Avatar toys are released at Comic Con.
August
Biggest News of the Month – Yelp Introduces AR Monocle via Easter Egg
Coolest App / Video – Bruce Sterling’s Layar Keynote – At the Dawn of the AR Industry
* Bruce released an AR-infused novel Catyadids in 2009, so it was only natural that Layar asked him to speak about the fledgling industry. The speech is memorable with too many great lines to pick from for quoting here.
Best Article / Interview – Thomas Wrobel’s Proposal for an Open AR Network
* Easily Tish’s best interview because it turned into more than a reflection of past events or hopes for the future. Tish and Thomas have since rallied AR professionals and amateurs to join the AR Wave collaborative effort. They seek to use Wave as the platform for an open AR network and have recently been testing code.
Other notable things that happened in August – AR Strippers!
September
Biggest News of the Month – Vuzix 920Wrap Will Not be See-Through
* The biggest disappointment of the year was the news from Vuzix. Good see-through AR glasses are supposed to release us from the tyranny of the “magic lens”. Hoping 2010 brings better news, but I’m really waiting until 2011.
Coolest App / Video – Augmenting Aerial Maps with Dynamic Information
Best Article / Interview – Gene Becker’s Design Strategies for Magic Lens.
Other notable things that happened in September – No more Gamaray - Death of a Browser, Int13 and Total Immersion getting into bed, and the augmented reality reading list.
October
Biggest News of the Month – News from ISMAR09, News from ISMAR09 #2 and UgoTrade ISMAR09 Coverage.
* I was lucky enough to attend and speak at ISMAR09. The energy of the participants was exceptional and I came away from it more jazzed about AR than I was going in. Hopefully the ISMAR committee will be releasing the videos from the event soon.
Coolest App / Video - 2D sketches become 3D reality.
Best Article / Interview – ISMAR09 HMD Review
* I think I summed up the current state of HMDs for AR pretty well. I’m hoping 2010 brings a suprise for AR HMDs.
Other notable things that happened in October – AR Wave discussion on UgoTrade, Wikitude for the iPhone first look and Giant Hand Torments City
November
Biggest News of the Month – Junaio hits the app store.
Coolest App / Video – Interactive Entertainment Using AR
* The videos about the Disney experiences were similar to what Mark Mine showed us at ISMAR. They really show us how technology can transcend our perceptions of reality.
Best Article / Interview – Augmented Planet’s Head-to-head browser test (and part 2)
* Lester broke down the various browsers in this excellent hands-on challenge. Read both parts to find out the winner.
Other notable things that happened in November – Business Week’s Article about: Getting Beyond the Hype and Robert Rice’s reply.
December
Biggest News of the Month – Goggle Googles is released.
* The giant has awoken. Goggles has many implications for Googles ideas on the AR market. This won’t be the last time we’ll hear from them about this technology.
Coolest App / Video – Layer 3.0.
* While Layar has since pulled the app from the app store and had to issue and apology, the version 3.0 still holds lots of promise.
Best Article / Interview – Augmented Reality in 2010: Predictions (10 part series)
* A wide swath of the AR blogosphere had the opportunity to participate in the predictions series from Games Alfresco run by Rouli Nir. More interesting, snarky, and possibly-true predictions that you can shake an augmented stick at.
Other notable things that happened in December – AR Wave FAQ on UgoTrade, Enkin acquired by Google, ARDevCamp, Wikitude Teams Up with Lonely Planet, 10 Worse Uses of AR in 2009, and Nexus One News and Implications of AR.
What It All Means
Whew. After reviewing hundreds of articles and videos, I’m sure I’ve missed a number of important happenings from the year 2009. If I have, please make sure to comment and I’ll add it if I have overlooked it.
What does it all mean? That is entirely up to you. The year has brought many advances to augmented reality and the ceiling is sky-high for 2010. There will be surprises, excuses, apologies, releases, re-releases and more. Money will be pumped in, not all where it should go, and progress will be made. We’ll laugh at the videos, smile at our favorite products and complain when it does work as expected. Either way, it will be a year more interesting than the last and I’ll be here to watch it all unfold.
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10 Worst Uses of Augmented Reality in 2009
Posted by Tom Carpenter in AR Games, augmented reality on December 20th, 2009
Tis the season to reflect and review the year that’s about the scuttle its caboose into 2010. It’s been a huge year for augmented reality after decades of R&D, finally hitting the public’s awareness. Unfortunately, not all applications of the nascent technology showcased its possibilities. Instead, some slapped it into use without careful forethought and understanding of why augmented reality will be one of the most important technological aspects of our collective futures.
So I present what I believe are the 10 worst uses of augmented reality in 2009. I’m only looking at the commercial applications of AR, because R&D should be given the freedom to test code without stringent use-cases to guide its development. And often the commercial AR was bad because it was rushed onto market in a lame attempt to cash in on growing hype.
10. Hangman
While I never found an actual release of this game, the demo alone at the Tampa Internet and Technology Summit 2009 made me grimace in pain. Hopefully HD Interactive scuttled their AR plans after this demo and redrew their strategy. When I first saw this video, it inspired me to write this post.
9. Firefighter 360
The “360″ in the name is appropriate because you’ll be spinning in circles putting out fires. This app is similar to many others released that have a live camera feed, but don’t actually connect to any real world objects. The fires and firetrucks are reached through a console controller style interface. To really be AR, I would expect players to have to move around.
8. Mosquitoes
The description for the game reads — “This fun game uses the compass and accelerometer for a super realistic ‘augmented reality’ effect.” If you have to use the word super for your game, then you’re probably not going to be successful. If the mosquitoes actually landed on me or I had to move around the room to attack them, that would be cool, but once again the only thing I’m getting out of this game is dizziness.
7. Arcade Reality
Another AR shooter that could be played in a virtual environment for the same effect as the augmented one. They at least get points for multiple game play modes.
6. Dodge Avenger AR Campaign
As Rouli has been chronicling, augmented reality for selling cars jumped the shark last spring. Dodge didn’t get the memo and released this PC based campaign last month.
5. Virtual Makeup
Games Alfresco found this scary gem of an AR video in its Not Ready for Primetime post. We’ve seen lots of compelling try-on kiosks for other products like shirts, hats and jewelry, but turning your customers into scary clowns probably isn’t a great idea.
4. Avon Perfume
I’ll be the first to admit I could be missing something in the translation, but didn’t anyone tell Avon that perfumes smell and augmented reality is primarily about vision? And how many people sit around posing pictures with their perfume bottles.
3. Twitter 360
This one is more about timing and scope than anything. The Twitter 360 app received much press including this spot on the Augmented Planet, but that same week, Layar came out with its 3.0 version which made Twitter layers possible within its browser. The lifespan of these narrowly focused apps are going to become shorter and shorter as the reality browsers and big name companies like Google get into the game.
2. Best Buy Campaign
I could have picked from any number of paper marker based augmented reality campaigns, there were a ton of them this year, but I chose Best Buy from last spring as the unlucky example.
1. Always Feminine Hygiene Ad
An epic fail for so many reasons. Besides being a typical paper-based marker campaign, the use of augmented reality had no tie-in with the feminine hygiene product. The usage was so bad I had to rant about it in July.
There we have it, ten of the worst uses of augmented reality in 2009. While augmented reality is on the rise and many applications are impressive uses of the technology, we still have quite a few stinkers in the bunch. Usually the culprit is misunderstanding of the technology or rushing it to the public without deciding if its actually fixing anything. Blake Collins from OneZeroThrice expanded on this trend in his post about Who is, and Who Isn’t Augmented Reality.
And because I’m a nice guy, if you made it to my 10 worst list or you want to stay off of it for next year, I’m offering up my post about the 10 Things Your AR App Must Have to Succeed to help you mend your errant ways. I wrote it in anticipation of the over-hyped iPhone 3.1 OS, but it can be applied to any usage of the technology. While its certain there are misguided plans hatching at corporate conference rooms all over the world right now that will make us groan and roll our eyes at their attempts at augmented reality, I’m buoyed by the knowledge that it only takes a few proper applications to change the world.
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Are These Games Really AR Games?
Posted by Tom Carpenter in AR Games, augmented reality on December 7th, 2009
Two new games from Slapdown Games tout themselves as using augmented reality. Are they really?
The video shows the player taking a picture with a marker to establish the coordinate plane. After that it loads and the the game is played on that picture (squashing bugs and driving cars.) Does this really count as an augmented reality game or is it a picture reality game (ie – not AR)?
Watch the videos then answer the poll.
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GaTech DVFX’09 Augmented Reality Promos
Posted by Tom Carpenter in AR Games, augmented reality on December 6th, 2009
The Digital Video Special Effects (DVFX) group at Georgia Tech has made a few promotion videos about augmented reality games made at the school. There’s no real augmented reality in these videos (besides the game of ARHrrrr!), but I got a chuckle out of them.
Augmented Zombies
Augmented Alice
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Bamzooki – Augmented Reality TV Game Show
Posted by Tom Carpenter in AR Games, augmented reality on November 29th, 2009
Robots battling it out for glory is nothing new. Augmented reality robots racing around real streets and battling on rooftops is so 2010.
The BBC show, Bamzooki, is an augmented reality TV game show in which autonomous creatures called Zooks are designed and then controlled by participants on the show by shouting instructions during the battles. The game is run by:
The BBC’s Virtual Studiotechnology was used to enable realtime composition of the 3D rendered graphics with live camera feeds. Each studio camera has a dedicated render PC to render the virtual scene from that camera’s perspective. To know what a studio camera’s perspective is, each camera is fitted with a second ‘Free-D’ camera which points towards the ceiling. On the ceiling are reflective, circular bar codes. The 3-D camera data is fed to a computer system that identifies the targets on the ceiling and calculates that camera’s position and orientation, 50 times a second. Series 4 adopted vinten tracking peds instead of FREE-D as an alternative approach.
The contest runs in realtime on a networked PC. All the clients receive contest scene information and render their scene from their studio camera’s point of view. A bank of chromakey boxes then composite the virtual and the live feed together to provide a realtime composite. This video stream can be sent to the studio camera monitors so that camera operators can view the composite and hence follow the action in realtime.
The relaunch of the show began this November and the new season will run thirteen shows. The Zook Toolkit comes with a simulator and a Motion Player to watch your Zook perform. The Zooks can be run in an entirely VR environment, but the show uses AR to put the battles into the real world. Some schools are using the Zook Toolkit to stage their own battles.
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Virtual Sandbox (Sim City Meets Augmented Reality)
Posted by Tom Carpenter in AR Games, augmented reality on November 20th, 2009
A group of students at the National University of Singapore has developed an AR game similar to Sim City using VRML and ARToolKit.
Virtual Sandbox is an educational software targeted at kids between the ages of 4-6. It provides children with an interactive learning environment for the learning of English vocabulary. By combining the concepts of Sim City, Flash Cards and Augmented Reality technology, we demonstrate how the bene?ts of both tangible and non-tangible interactions can be merged to create a fun, game-like learning experience for young children.
As a University project it gets high marks. The controls wouldn’t be suitable for an older age group since using a PlayStation or Wii controller is more natural to kids these days. But the younger crowd is more willing to move things around with their hands. These types of games will need to move to gesture based controls like the EyePet if they want to be commercialized.
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Total Immersion’s Augmented Reality 3D Puzzle
Posted by Tom Carpenter in AR Games, augmented reality on October 30th, 2009
An augmented reality flying car this game is not.
While this AR game made by Total Immersion at the Arizona Center isn’t layered with complexity, it really couldn’t be done any other way. While you could use a controller or mouse to move the boxes around, allowing for natural movement with a square of cardboard makes the game more intuitive. And the video boxes couldn’t done except within a digital medium.
Currently, most of the AR games being created are recreations of standard ideas – shooters, real-time strategy, zombies, etc. Augmented reality is a completely new medium that allows for a rethinking of game mechanics. If you’re a game designer, don’t get stuck in the past, show us something audacious and we’ll shower you in our hard earned cash.
Popularity: 27% [?]
Time Travel with Augmented Reality
Posted by Tom Carpenter in AR Games, augmented reality on October 27th, 2009
Augmented reality can help us see back in time, making history come alive.
The presentation at ISMAR from the Beijing Instituite of Technology showed how they could use AR to reconstruct the Yuanmingyuan, or “Garden of All Gardens” without damaging the current appearance of the ruins. The Yuanmingyuan was burnt down by Anglo-French forces in 1860 and their project uses AR to project the original architecture onto the site.
They plan to utilize a coin-operated viewer to allow tourists to see the AR version of the site.
This type of historical eye is also being demonstrated in Cluny France to show what the abby looked like before it’d been destroyed during the French Revolution.
I predict (since we’re all busy predicting the AR future) that you won’t be able to visit a historical site in five years without an AR viewer to see the past. Old civil war sites won’t be the same when you can watch a thousand Union troops storm the Confederate lines. Maybe kids will cheer when dad fires up the old Studebaker for a trip across the country to revisit historical sites.
But the real question is–will AR be able to help when you have to drive eighty miles out of the way to visit the giant ball of twine?
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A Few ISMAR09 Demos
Posted by Tom Carpenter in AR Games, augmented reality on October 25th, 2009
There’s so much for me to talk about from ISMAR09 and I was only there for half of the conference. I have a half-dozen more posts sketched out for the next couple of weeks. I did get to attend the demo night on Monday which showcased the real hands-on applications of augmented reality. Gail Carmichael posted up a video of some of the demos, so I’ll try to expand on what was shown.
Sony EyePet Demo- Ever since I saw the trailer for this game, I’ve been wanting to own it. Even so much that I’m willing to buy a PS3. The ability for the camera to pick up hand motions was impressive. In the video, he’s bouncing the head of an AR bobble-head doll to make bubbles come out and tickling the monkey with his fingertips. As a game, its mostly a cute demonstration of the technology that aims at the 3-8 year old market (and AR enthusiasts), but it’s a precursor of bigger things. In the future, motion capture will be the new controller.
The Tank and Kid Demo – This one showed how virtual objects and real ones can interact in a seamless manner. Once again this technology will be best used in games, but it could bleed over into many other applications.
Shooter VR/AR Demo – Notice I’m not using the real demo names because I’m not even sure what “Computing Alpha Mattes in Real-Time for Noisy Mixed Reality Video Streams” means. Unfortunately, its hard to get a feel for what this demo did from the video. The video makes it look like a cross between Max Headroom and a VR game. In some ways, that’s all it was, because it used blue screen technology to mix in virtual reality dioramas with the player. I found it interesting when the player would look at the area at the edge of both the real and the virtual. I got a real sense of how these two realities can mix together at the edges. Let’s hope they can figure out how to do this without the blue screen.
ProFORMA Rapid Model Acquisition - Here’s one I can almost understand from the abstract title. The program creates 3D models in real-time which is mind blowing. The downside is you need to rotate the object around for the camera to pick up the object, but the usage has crazy possibilities. It won the Best Demo for a good reason. Mix the ProFORMA with other technologies like photosynth and we can achieve a 3D mapping of the world in rapid (4-5 years) time. More on ProFORMA here.
Animatronic Shader Lamps Avatars - I would have been more impressed by this demo if Mark Mine from the Disney Imagineers hadn’t explained this same technology during his talk. Regardless, it grabbed attention because they had a comic as the face making fun of passerbys.
Thanks to Gail Carmichael who took the video and also posted more pictures about it on her blog. I sat next to her during the Disney keynote while she took tons of pictures with her giant expensive looking camera and uploaded them to her Flickrstream. I had total camera envy and was afraid she’d laugh at my tiny phone camera. Cheers to you Gail for helping put on a great ISMAR and taking fantastic pictures.
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