Fairy Fate, a home-made game not unlike PlayStation’s Eye of Judgement.

Augmented Reality story telling done for a university project, AR Gekijou (AR Theatre).

Very pleasing to see some connection between augmented reality technology and spirit/the paranormal being made and visualized in an interactive manner. Using technology to see and destroy/interact with spirits is very reminiscent of Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within and I wouldn’t be surprised if it was a source of inspiration for TI and Hanwa.

No idea where exactly this is. The white paper refers to it as simply “Dark Ride: Ghost Hunt”. Total Immersion’s website does list another attraction with the “Dark Ride” label, (les ANIMAUX du FUTUR [Animals of the Future]), which was also referred to as a “Hidden Reality Ride” — a very charming and appropriate terminology I think, given that this augmented reality does imply that an alternate or unseen world is already there, waiting to be revealed, an idea that other augmented reality demonstrations and applications are sadly without.

Links:
Augmented Reality Video Gun White paper October, 2009
Total Immersion Amusement Parks
Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within (IMDb)

Augmented Reality in Quartz Composer used to generate OSC messages to manipulate parameters of Buffer Override as an insert in an audio track.

Just a preview, and how you can use the ARDJ software with ableton… basically me messing around with it. Talking about the software a bit and how it works. :) Enjoy!

Get the software free at http://www.lipert.net/ardj

A lot of buzz around AR has been around its use as a means to either modify the information we see about the world around us, gaming, or ‘magic’ (as described in a previous post). Earlier this last week we saw AR not as a result, but as a means input or control in “Home automation through augmented reality” which used QR codes as markers to activate objects around the house. The end result does not involve any augmented or modified vision or perception, but rather, real life changes in physical objects and environments (on or off, dark room or bright room). This example very loosely qualifies as ‘augmented reality’ in my book, but is not undeserving of attention from the AR community as a example of computer vision with (long winded) real world application (not efficiency, but visible to us without aid of a device). ARDJ sort of follows this same track in its purpose– it provides an alternative means of control of particular parameters. The end results is again, not visual. AR or not? Meeeh—- but it is a reminder that AR doesn’t have to be related to navigation or information overlay, and can exist as a broader, more creative technology allowing for organic human gesture and manipulation to come into play.

A final project for DVFX 2009 at Georgia Tech. The video is an advertisement for a Georgia Tech Augmented Environments Lab project to create an augmented reality storytelling application. One of the examples for this project was Alice in Wonderland, which serves as a basis for our video.

Technical details available via Create Digital Motion.

A virtual pit by Georgia Tech’s Augmented Environments Lab

“This video shows an augmented reality application we have developed to use as an experimental testbed for evaluating what components of an AR experience contribute to a user feeling “present” or immersed. In this experiment the participants are presented with a virtual hole that drops three stories and are asked to perform tasks around this “pit.” Their heart rate, galvanic skin response, and skin temperature are measured while the participant is shown different versions of the pit. The goal is to develop quantitative and qualitative methods for measuring how immersed a user is in an AR experience and to develop guidelines for people building AR applications.”

This is really cool. I’m always interested to see experiments related to the psychological effect of AR and mixed reality in general. Their website contains a little library of publications related to their research in AR as well.

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vFrame, a stop-motion concept video for outdoor AR social gaming.

vFrame is ‘yet another’ concept video for an AR social gaming platform, but their decision to use stop motion for their concept video made it unique enough to set it apart from the rest.

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“Augmented Reality as a Tool for Improving the Utility of Information” by Prof. Bruce Thomas (University of South Australia)

A reasonable introduction and ‘matome’ of augmented reality technology.

Technically I should be waiting until next week for another edition of Did You Miss It?, but this one was just too exciting for me to let slide. Students and researchers from Project Juvenile at Reality Media / Mobile Communications Lab at Ritsumeikan University in Kyoto have made an augmented reality game based on the world of Dennou Coil. System includes an HMD and ‘Data Glove’ (made with InterSense IS900), and incorporates many functions and items seen in Dennou Coil, such as metatags. Documentation video and links just after the break.

Project Juvenile 2009 [JP]
PJ2009′s Dennou Coil [JP]
Setup Diagram [JP]

PozARToolkit and rtPozAR source and documentation available at http://foilskin.seesaa.net/ [JP]

Documentation at: http://www.k2.t.u-tokyo.ac.jp/perception/VolumeSlicingDisplay/index-e.html

Video embedded after the break.

* You may need a niconico douga account to view this video. Non-Japanese speakers may want to see this guide for help on how to sign up.

Doing my regular rounds of new AR demos and articles, I came across a fun little demo posted on もじもじTV [mojimojiTV], called Shabette Otenki Kensaku [しゃべってお天気検索]. It combines speech recognition (SR), augmented reality (AR), and the TenkiAPI (an API for weather information). Users can hold the marker before the camera, wait for the count-down, and then say a city-name. The application then uses the TenkiAPI to call current weather for the city-name used, and outputs the information using AR.

By no means meant to be an application used everyday, it’s an interesting little concept piece and definitely has me thinking about other ways we can start combing SR an AR together.