Posts Tagged Disney
Total Immersion’s Ghost Hunting Experience
Posted by Tom Carpenter in augmented reality on December 16th, 2009
Mark Pine, the keynote speaker from Disney Imagineering at ISMAR09, gave the audience compelling reasons why truly interactive experiences are the future of entertainment and the one I remember most was: “It’s about connecting with the user.”
Total Immersion has recently partnered with Hanwa Co. (Japan) to create a live action augmented reality video game that connects with the user in much the same way that Mark from Disney had displayed. Unlike the projection based AR system that Disney used, Total Immersion have their guests wear a backpack and wield a video gun to hunt ghosts in the fully explorable house earning points as they capture them.
“We’re demonstrating the magical ability of augmented reality to capture visitors’ attention and imagination,” said Bruno Uzzan, CEO, Total Immersion. “Guests experience real time interaction with augmented reality content — and are pulled into real life videogame, dynamically.”
More pictures can be seen on Total Immersion’s blog about AR and they recently uploaded this video to YouTube.
Total Immersion reports a high revisit rate with teens and gamers which bodes well for AR driven entertainment. Their AR entertainment experience makes me realize that the first real augmented reality HMDs won’t be bought by consumers, but instead will be used in malls and other family entertainment centers to create immersive gaming experiences like this ghost hunt.
As the technology becomes more robust with occlusion, better graphics, and faster tracking; the complexity of the games will grow. It’s not hard to imagine AR games like the one’s described in Larry Niven’s Dream Park taking over the laser tag centers in your local mall. We just won’t tell the kids that they’re really LARPing.
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Interactive Entertainment using Augmented Reality
Posted by Tom Carpenter in Uncategorized on November 18th, 2009
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.
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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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