Augmented Fear of Heights

Augmented Fear of Heights

Those crazy kids at Georgia Tech. In the last couple of days, we have seen augmented reality used to make you laugh, amazed and uncomfortable, so naturally someone, somehow had to make you scared. That's where Georgia Tech comes into the picture -

... we are interested in how to create systems where the user loses the sense of mediation, and begins to respond to being immersed in a blended physical/virtual as if it was a single “world.”

Our approach to exploring AR and Presence has been to develop an AR presence questionnaire in parallel with a physiological presence experiment analogous to the UNC VR “pit” experiment, which leverages a strong physiological reaction (fear of heights) to measure presence.

The experiment asked the participants to preform certain tasks around that pit, while their heart rate, galvanic skin response and skin temperature were measured. By doing so, the researchers hoped to develope a quantitative measurement of how immersive was the AR experience. Sadly, they don't report on their results yet, but you can tell from the video that some participants were shaken by the event.
Next time, they'll confront volunteers with an approaching virtual train and have paramedics on stand-by.

More details here.

Wildlife's Fate is in your Hands

Wildlife's Fate is in your Hands

Wow, this is quite a busy week, full of augmented reality goodies. This next application comes to us from WWF China, and I almost missed it.



Using the freely available application for S60 cellular phones, you can place a teddy bear in the "real" (urban) world, and watch it getting injured in many unpleasant way. Apart from hitting walls, falling down stairs and getting hit by cars, you can manually torture it by flicking your finger.
That should encourage you to protect wildlife's natural habitats, but I'm not that sure the application serves its purpose. On the bright side, it's a campaign that uses AR in an innovative way, and doesn't follow the path of previous novelty-AR ad campaigns. It was conceived by BBH China and implemented by Qdero.

Link, via Sergey Ten Twitter feed, sorta.

Feel Unease with the Cloud Mirror

Feel Unease with the Cloud Mirror

Eric Gradman dropped me a note about an art installation he presented two weeks ago at an event named Mindshare:


The Cloud Mirror from eric gradman on Vimeo.

So says Eric:

Live video captured by a camera and is re-projected on the wall behind the camera, functioning like a “magic mirror.” But the CLOUD MIRROR software alters the images on the way to the screen. It runs an algorithm that tracks faces from frame to frame and also examines each frame for 2D barcodes printed on attendee badges. By pairing each face with a badge, and each badge id with a database row, the CLOUD MIRROR can identify by name whoever is standing in front of the installation.

It's very similar to this Squidder's video, but adds more ways to embarrass yourself and others. More (mostly technical) details can be found here, but in a nutshell it's based on ARToolKitPlus, OpenCV for face recognition, and lots of python.

(Remember, you can too drop me a note about any AR related news by sending a mail to rouli.net ~a~t~ gmail.com)

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!

Augmented Comedy

Augmented Comedy

When I get sick of all that marker-based novelty augmented-reality, I protest and complain. But it seems that when Anatoly Zenkov had the same feelings, he created the first (?) comedic clip about AR, entitled "Me Too":


Me too (doing some AR stuff)! from Anatoly Zenkov on Vimeo.

Weekly Linkfest

Weekly Linkfest

Here are some other AR news from around the web:

• Enter the mind of Ronald Chevalier, an experience that promotes this film.
• Georgia Tech's has a new infomercial for their mixed reality design class.
• Study finds that when it comes to in-car navigation, augmented reality is better than 3D egocentric view aids (such as plain old GPS devices). Who could have guessed?
• Geocaching using augmented reality is such a neat idea, I'm surprised no one before Jacob at Trimagination thought about it.
• Looking for an AR primer? Rusty Henderson has one covering the basics (with many videos), and Tom Carpenter has some more details.

The quote of the week comes from Robert Rice's twitter feed:

My team has figured out how to build most of Rainbows End. Just matter of time and funding now... /evil scientist cackle/

I guess that if they really achieved that feat, funding will not be a problem.

And finally, the weekly video comes from GeoVector (which I previouslly covered here). It's a concept video from 1995 and contains some interesting ideas. It just shows that even if you think that you have a novel idea, someone has thought about it before. Jump to 4:51 for a really cool augmented frogger:

Living Sasquatch - First Boffswana Ad

Living Sasquatch - First Boffswana Ad

Link Snacks, manufacturer of Jack Link's Beef Jerkey has adopted Bigfoot for their "feed your wild side" campaign. Like so many campaigns these days, this one also uses (novelty) augmented reality for that additional magical touch. It's actually quite sophisticated, allowing you to compose a short animation for Bigfoot to carry out (using 35 pre-created animations), as can be seen in the following video:


Living Sasquatch - Papervision - Augmented Reality from Boffswana on Vimeo.

It's a pity you can't automatically upload your animation to Youtube, and have to first download them to your computer, hurting the "virality" of this campaign. It's been alive for a few days now, and still no one uploaded his animation to Youtube. Another possible improvement could have been using Jack Link's Beef Jerkey bags as some kind of special markers, opening up some secret movements for Bigfoot.
Anyway, you can play with it yourself and see other's videos at the campaign's site. This marks the first commercial use of Boffswana's Releas3D technology.

Now, who will be the first to upload an erotic video featuring Bigfoot taking a page from Spore?

link (via ARTweets)