Halloween Augmented Reality Special

Halloween Augmented Reality Special

Following are some AR tricks and treats I've collected over the last month, which make me think this Halloween should be declared as the first augmented holiday. Judge for yourself.

First we have the interactive Halloween mirror from Instructables. This little do-it-yourself project will let you and your party guests try out gory and scary masks without spending money or buying makeup. Just remember to turn-off the screen saver before installing it in your living room. (Note, you can stop watching this video after the 1 minute mark, it just repeats itself)



Taking the same face detection approach, Disney lets you become one of the villains from their animated movies. However, their Halloween Time application spice things up by including a mini-game, so kids may find it interesting:




While that Instructables project used OpenCV for face detection, HIT Lab NZ has opted for a simpler solution - just wear a marker on your forehead and turn yourself into a skeleton. On the upside, it's in 3d. Quite a memento mori moment:



Last but not least, Meijer, an American retail chain from the mid-west bring us what is probably the most attractive Halloween application. Meijer chose to promote its line of products for Halloween by letting visitors to this site try on 3d masks without the need of wearing markers, though you do have to install a plugin from Total Immersion. They even let you record yourself wearing the virtual mask, and make it possible to alter your voice (which according to them is an AR first). Sadly, they don't let you upload videos to Youtbue, fearing inappropriate videos, and they don't have a public gallery of user-made videos (which didn't prevent users to upload about 1300 videos) so I'm left with putting a screenshot:



Here's a direct link for one of the upload videos, to get a better idea.

Know of any other Halloween related augmented reality project? Tell us about it in the comments.