Augmented Magic Trick

Augmented Magic Trick

I'm unusually late covering this, and if you are a true augmented reality fan, you have probably seen it already (it was covered by Tom, Jan and even Make and Instructables had a piece about it). But for the sake of completeness, and since it's a really cool use of AR and I've got some behind the scenes pictures, I feel obliged to have a post about it as well.
Marco Tempest is a Swiss born American magician, and since I've never seen any of his shows (but now I will try my best to do so), I have to quote Wikipedia that says he "is best known as a magician/performance artist who combines video, computer graphics and other technology of the moment with the ideas and technology of magic". A great example is this next clip that he sent some of us AR bloggers a few days ago:


Augmented Reality Magic 1.0 from Marco Tempest on Vimeo.

I don't know what's more impressive here, the magic trick or the brilliant yet non-obtrusive use of technology. According to Tempest (if you can believe a magician :), it's all done in real time, sounds, graphics and voice over, and no post processing is involved. He used "ARToolkitPlus, OpenCV, OpenFrameworks, MacCam and some magic" to make it run on a Mac Book Pro. He was generous enough to share some behind the scenes pictures, and here's how the flying sixes were done (click for a larger image):



Innovative concepts like this one, really give me hope that AR will not stay in its current novelty, "Me Too" stage. Good work Marco!