Mmm…art.  The best art is the kind you can stare at while it memorizes you.  Enjoy.

Dev Harlan – “Parmenides I”, 2011 from Dev Harlan on Vimeo.

As the polygon counts increase, so will the disturbing nature of the in-your-face AR installations.  What’s the AR version of throwing pig blood on a person wearing a fur coat?

FREE FALL is a multi-site installation art piece using Augmented Reality. it is currently installed at the bank headquarters of the top ten recipients of TARP funds. To view FREE FALL, download the app Layar and launch “WHAT SUITS US”. For more information visit, http://layar.it/gBvBom or www.john-markikeda.com

We’ve come so far since the days of shadow puppets on the living room wall.

A little real-time camera trickery and some augmented reality, and wa-la…invisible cube.

A camera fixed on the concrete cube sculpture recognizes the presence of human faces within its scope. With a randomized choice it will focus on one of the bystanders and adjust its movement to his; tracking the eye movements of the viewer, a software computes the corresponding angle of view projecting onto the cube the very section of the space the sculpture is blocking from the viewers eye; thus making the cube appear transparent.
The video sculpture, Durchsehen, Exp. 01 (Augmented Perspective) overwrites the common notion of perspective and plays with the significance of perspective in an art historical perspective; the work of art evades the gaze of the viewer or rather: the two are equated. The gaze of the observer coincides with the object of observance in a piece that also draws a line to former strategies of dealing with vision and depiction: the renaissance praxis of “painting on glass”.
Through the real-time projection on the cube a 3dimensional depiction of 2dimensionality occurs; the catoptric turns dioptric. The framing plane of the conventional video image becomes fragmented as work and reality intertwine in an augmented perspective.

Learn more about it from the creators Daniel Franke and Markus Kison.

The biggest news about the movie Avatar has been the 3D experience and the way its blown the doors off the previous records. The movie has garnered huge success because it pushed the boundaries of technology and told an interesting story.

I loved the movie and the way 3D helped give more perspective to the enviroment. My own Star Trek loving mother didn’t even realize the Na’vi were CGI. She thought they were people in blue suits (really… I’m not joking.) And though storytelling will become important to later advanced augmented reality applications, it’s not what I wanted to point out.

James Cameron is part art-dude and part tech-geek. He waited for years for the technology to ripen enough to do the movie the way he wanted. One of the innovations that he created for the movie was the Fusion camera for the live-action sequences. Normally, scenes are filmed before a green screen and then the CGI is added afterwards. The actors play a game of make-believe and the director has to guess at how the enviroment will unfold around them. CGI movies tend view flatly because the emotions are added later by the special effects guys and not the actors on the scene. Cameron has changed all that.

The Fusion camera system is an augmented reality viewport into the CGI world. When Cameron was filming the actors, he was able to direct them and see the results. When he looks through his camera, he can see them interacting with the world Pandora as the nine foot Na’vi and help them tell the story. The camera itself wasn’t even a real camera in the sense that it filmed the action. The camera allowed Cameron to see the action being recorded by multiple sensors and cameras.  Once the action was recorded, he could go back and reshoot the action from a different perspective, even with the actors gone.

Facial expression was another hurdle they had to jump to make the movie work. So they added little cameras hanging on people’s heads to capture their range of facial expressions and then tweaked algorithms to get them to react correctly.  Even now we can pull off this trick.

Together these systems are similar to an immersive augmented reality world. While we don’t have the HMDs, complete camera access and processing power to pull off the world of Pandora now, time and continued improvement will make lesser versions possible.

If you look at the Fusion camera system, the camera is essentially the HMD display, albeit a large and bulky one. Multiple cameras, RFIDs and tracking markers help the computer understand the world, and complex and powerful computers put all the pieces together. I can only imagine that this system could be turned into a mind-blowing game in an empty warehouse with the proper HMDs.

Essentially, the movie Avatar teaches us that augmented reality has sky-high practical possibilities. All the components of his Fusion system can be ported to the commercial world (not now, but in three or four years) and used to make complex and believable environments overlaid our own world.

In the future, you too can be a nine-foot tall blue Na’vi and you won’t even have to have your soul sucked through a fiber-optic tree.

The new Layar 3.0release brings more functionality to the reality browser.  To help people envision what the service can do, Layar touts five new use-cases:

Five Layar 3.0 Use-Cases

1) Architecture Showcase – Visualize the final building at a construction site.

2) Storytelling: Beatles Tour – A visual tour of forty-three locations in London involving the Beatles.  Each stop must be followed in order.

3) History Comes Alive – See the past reconstructed before your eyes with facts and 3D models.

4) Art, Messages & Fun Objects – Weird objects placed in unexpected places.

5) B2B & Personalization – Useful for businesses and social layers, enabling interaction with Twitter (take that Twitter 360!) and Foursquare services.

While these five use-cases expand the Layar reality browser (and more info on them can be seen here), I think they’re missing a huge use-case that’s now possible with 3.0.  After reading through the Layar Developer Wiki, I found these functions that should help make Layar games possible.

Two Layar 3.0 Functions

* User added 3D objects – 3D objects up to 5000 polygons can be created with any 3D program (assuming it can create a Wavefront)

* Auto-Triggered Actions – POIs can trigger a URI (audio, video, webpage, etc) which can allow for additional programming aspects to happen.  By utilizing functions within a webpage, most programming tools can be utilized within the Layar framework. 

 These two simple functions can add a lot of versatility to the program to make games.  And while the 3D graphics are still pretty limited and animations aren’t yet possible, think back to the dawn of gaming when text based games like ZORK were all the rage, or simple 2D lines and text created time-sinks like Wizardry.  Even simple sprites doomed many a night I should have been studying with Lemmings!  The key to these games is that they should be locative, otherwise, what’s the point?

 10 Games That Could Be Made with Layar 3.0

1) Capture the Flag – Instead of capturing flags on your opponent, hide flags in the city and capture your friends flags by visiting their locations. 

2) Choose Your Own Adventure – Who didn’t read these cheesy books in grade school?  Be a fun way to host a weekly bar-hop.

3) Simple RPG- a city based RPG that used locations as the “action areas.”  Any math or combat resolving could be done through a URI webpage call and then reveal the 3D model (win=dead creature/lose=gravestone).  Go into Joe’s Pub and kill a goblin for 5xp and then drink a pint to celebrate your victory. 

4) Hidden Treasure- Clues and visual markers only seen through Layar can lead you to finding “special points” in the city. 

5) Avatar Battles- Customize an avatar that does battle with others for control of locations.  Think Foursquare crossed with Pokemon.

6) Economy Game – Buy and Sell real properties with virtual money.  Must visit the location to purchase, can develop it with special actions (putting special 3D models in the area) and mark it with your sign.

7) Mystery Games- In a randomized Clue-style game, participants are given clues in different locations they visit and can ask questions using the URI webpage (pull down list) to figure out the daily murder. 

8 ) The Hidden Story – A mosaic story could be told through the location in the city.  For those that visit all of them, they can piece together the whole narrative that involves history, places and interesting people while the occasional 3D object might illustrate the narrative. 

9) Planet War- Mine resources at locations, purchase tanks and other warfare equipment that can be places in areas you want to control.  The website resolve winners and you see your battle regalia in the location.  Take over your favorite eating establishment with a load of Panzers.

10) Lemmings!- I don’t really know how to do Lemmings! with Layar 3.0, but I’m sure someone much more creative than I can do it.  It is the greatest game of all time, right?

The use of augmented reality in our daily lives is still a few years away.  The technology and business model hasn’t yet reached the point where it’s cheap enough for the masses.

The entertainment business is a different story as they’ve been using augmented reality for some time now.  My eyes were opened during the keynote speech at ISMAR09 by Mark Mine, a Walt Disney Imagineering Director.  They use AR in a variety of interesting and imaginative ways (well duh! they are Disney afterall.)

“Magic sand” interactive experience using projections on top of sand to create volcanos and playing with turtles.

KimPossible activity using hand-held comm units that led kids on a secret adventure through the park.

Building sized projections of ghosts during holidays like this video of Space Mountain on Halloween.

Mark also showed us some great scenic illusions using projectors on a live scene, but unfortunately I couldn’t find a video.  What Mark showed us is how to use AR–right now–by concentrating on the user experience.  The Imagineers had over 144 different degrees in their group, but he said the key was to have an art and communications background to go with the engineering.  Keep that little factoid in mind all you wanna-be AR designers.

A couple of his best lines were, “Seeing is believing, but touching is truth,” or “It’s about connecting with the user.”  The lesson I got from it for AR developers outside of the entertainment industry is to not forget the person using your new-fangled technology.

Mark wasn’t the only keynote speaker from the entertainment industry.  Natasha Tsakos who plays Zero, a worker everyman stuck between dreams and reality, in her UP WAKE performance piece, also gave a keynote.  Similar lessons can be learned from her experience as with the Disney talk.

Disney and UP WAKE are both big budget productions, but can the little guy use augmented reality to entertain?  I don’t know much about the guy in this next video, but he’s giving it his best go.

Or if you’re looking for a company to develop a projection AR entertainment experience right now, then look no further than Globalzepp.

These days everyone is enamored of augmented reality on the smartphone, but we shouldn’t forget there are other ways of using the nascent technology in creative and innovative ways.  Projection based AR still has a lot going for it in situations where it can reach a large audience.

I’m not sure how I missed this at ISMAR09, but wow, I’m impressed.  Michael has clearly thought about the user experience and how to make the technology seemless with reality.  I’m not entirely sure the eventual application, but I want to paint my Coralla with AR flame effects with it right now. 

This is the video that accompanied my poster at ISMAR 2009. The system I developed allows a user to digitally airbrush onto physical objects, with the ‘paint’ being projected onto the objects. The user is given a stencil, which can mask areas of the paint. The stencil tool is a board, but the actual shape of the mask is virtualised, which means you can do things like allowing the user to draw their own stencil to accomplish a specific task.

The key point in this video is building the user interface from physical tools that are augmented with digital information. This idea has uses well beyond the scope of a painting application.

 

Last spring, James Alliban created a sensation with his AR business card.  This time he brings us a less practical, but more interesting video of AR ribbons.

Here I’ve combined 2 reoccurring themes that run throughout my work – Augmented Reality and ribbons. It is an evolution of the particle trails code from AR Particle Beam. Initially I wanted to create a flocking effect for the ribbons, but didn’t quite get that far and ended up cheating. This will be the next step.

Give me a cheap HMD and a way to control the ribbons and my kids could spend a few hours out in the yard creating huge 3D ribbon murals.