Papervision – Augmented Reality (extended) from dpinteractive on Vimeo
Offworld dug up this splendid piece of augmented reality footage. Awesome. I mean, it’s not like webcams ever get much use in our gaming lives, but this does open up some possibilities. This clever tech comes from Australian clever types Digital Pictures, whose website seems to have been knocked over by general web interest.
Cool, but not too new, AR tech is the same thing http://selectparks.net/~julian/levelhead/ uses and has been implemented for hadndhelds like nokias and even the old gizmondo http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=Lfp8id6bpDU
However these guys are doing it in flash, which is pretty cool as it can work in browsers.
yeah those Japanese card battlers use the same tech, it’s everywhere these days
Yeah, the Playstation 3 already uses similar technology for Eye of Judgement. And as already mentioned, LevelHead is excellent use of this technology.
Still this has a much more cute monster than Eye of Judgement.
When they make decent VR headsets, a corridor shooter in your school/work/home would be awesome.
A virtual corridor shooter at a school or workplace is probably the kind of a can of worms the gaming industry won’t be toutching any time soon.
Oh, right, yeah. School shooter isn’t the kind of thing you want to market. Oops.
Another interesting use for this tech could be education. Imagine so a book could be able to spawn graphics and schemes in 3D. It will make books much more interesting.
Coupling it with some sort of goggles/headset would be awesome. Tabletop wargames, where you can see your pieces move and battle. Card games, boardgames, and so on. And the books/comics too, yes.
I don’t have a webcam, so I opened the image up in GIMP and used screencap to do it. It worked, but I think it kinda defeated the purpose of AR…
Here in Berkeley we had a programming competition called the Hackathon; some of my friends used the same software as this (ARToolkit) to create an AR Tower Defense game (one slip of paper to define the corner of the board, other slips of paper to define the tower positions, and monsters would be rendered on their own and detected by the towers). It won first place at the competition and was really freaking cool.
This kind of augmented reality is very easy to do as long as you have a black+white printer and a webcam, so I’m really hoping this kind of thing catches on.
Other than the guy not casting a shadow, that’s a really amazing thing. After all, how often do you look at a surface and just think, Imagine a little guy running past. It’d be like the Micro Machines games
Why is the little gherkin man so sad? :(
So how you code this? do you need some artificial vision algoritm to calculate the world coordinates, then use the webcam image as background for your 3D figures, and merge both using some “chrome” tecnique?
Note to self: read something about aritificial vision, buy a webcam.
Really reminds me of the new-ish Gibson novel, Spook Country. Except all the holo tech in the novel uses GPS extensively instead of little paper place-holder markers.
Kind of reminds me of Eyepet for PS3.
AR with fiducials has been around for ages, but just to echo, this is “new” because it’s done with Flash (via FLARToolkit). Meaning you can have that running on your browser.
Tei: it just finds certain patterns (the symbol printed on the paper) and then projects the model in the position.