[David] sent in a nice project to demonstrate augmented reality with ARtoolkit and discuss the deep philosophical underpinnings of the meaning of nothingness. The good news is he was able to create a volume control button on a sheet of paper with a marker. The bad news is the philosophical treatment is a bit weak; [David] built something cool, so we’re able to let that slide for now.

This build was inspired by the Impromptu Sound Board made using a Kinect and a piece of paper. The idea behind the sound board is simple – draw some buttons on the paper, and use them to play short sound clips. [David] took this idea to make a small tutorial on augmented reality for Occam’s Razor.

The hardware is very simple – just a webcam, a piece of paper, and a marker. After [David] draws a large square on the paper, the code recognizes it as a volume control. Rotating the paper counterclockwise increases the volume, and clockwise turns the volume down. It’s a neat build to get into the foundations of augmented reality.

Check out the video demo of [David]‘s build after the break.

[Ben Krasnow] wrote in, saying that every so often a news story appears covering a project in which researchers embed a single pixel LED display inside a contact lens. The most recent article he saw featured a contact-wearing rabbit, and not being one to shy away from damaging his own body in the name of science, he decided to try the experiment on himself.

He started out by soldering a tiny 0402 SMD LED to a hand wound coil, laminating the display between a pair of regular contact lenses. After trying to adhere the lenses to one another using water, he opted to tack the edges together with a pair of hot tweezers, making for a more secure but uncomfortable piece of eyewear. The LED is powered by a simple inductive coil he put together, which uses a spark gap transmitter to flash the LED on and off.

If you’re not freaked out by people sticking things in their eyes, be sure to check out the video below to see [Ben’s] augmented contact lens in action. While it might not give him Terminator-like vision, it’s pretty awesome considering he pieced it together in his workshop in his spare time.

We suppose they could just trade shoes, but that wouldn’t be a hack. [Timothy] wanted to design a team-building exercise at work, and he figured the best way to get some empathy would be to have people swap eyes. He calls his project eyeSwap and it is supposed to, “put the eye back in team.”

[Tim] found a few CRT viewfinders in a junk box attached small video cameras to each one. During the ‘training phase’ of his team-building exercises, both people playing the game complete a few hand-eye coordination tasks to get a feel for the rig. After the training phase, the inputs are swapped; Alice’s cameras are sent to Bob’s viewfinders and vice versa. The participants then complete the same tasks they did during the training phase.

The tasks aren’t that hard – putting balls into holes, for example – but it does require a huge amount of communication and coordination. eyeSwap reportedly builds trust and empathy towards others, and looks like a lot more fun than a ‘trust fall.’

Check out the video of two people playing eyeSwap after the break.

[Garnet Hertz], a professor and “artist in residence” at UC Irvine, built a drivable Outrun arcade cabinet for an experiment in augmented reality.

The old fiberglass and wood cabinet was hacked up and the motors, wheels, and drive train from an electric golf cart were stuffed inside. The original steering wheel and pedals were used for the controls. Although the top speed of the in-game car is about 180 mph, that was brought down to a reasonable 13 miles per hour.

The build doesn’t run on the original 68k processor. Instead, custom software is used to take real-world image data from two webcams on top of the cabinet. These images are then converted into Outrun sprites and displayed on the monitor. The software proportionally changes the speed of the in-game car, but it seems the difference between the game speed and real-life speed would be a little disconcerting. Although it’s not a real world track with the corkscrew loops of Race Drivin’, it’s still an interesting experiment in augmented reality.

Right now, we’re trying to figure out how to put this in our car. Outrun is now being reverse engineered, and the road layer code is complete. Does anyone want to take a stab at that build?

[Niklas Roy] sent in a project he just completed called PING! Augmented Pixel. At first glance the entire build is just a plain jane retro video game stuffed into an ATmega8 but looks can be deceiving. The video game is actually an augmented reality device that inserts a pixel into a video feed. The bouncing pixel can be manipulated with a camera – push the pixel and it goes off in another direction.

The project runs on an ATmega8 clocked at 16 MHz, and reads the video feed with the help of an LM1881 sync separator. There’s no schematics, but he thankfully included some code for his project. Everything is set up for PAL video, but this could be easily adapted for NTSC. Any Hack A Day readers want to take up the challenge of building this from just a description?

[Niklas] says there’s no reason this couldn’t have been done by Atari in the late seventies. There were economic reasons for not putting out a video camera controller, of course, and the R&D department may have been too busy playing Breakout with their eyebrows.

Check out the demo of the augmented pixel after the break.

Augmented reality might be all the rage these days, but when you take a closer look at the technology, you will find that these sorts of optical illusions are not new at all.

Artist [Sebastian Schmieg] was pondering augmented reality for a bit and decided he could replicate the effect using old and obsolete technology. His creation, called “81 Points of View”, uses an old Kodak slide projector and an elaborate mechanical setup to simulate the effect.

The slide projector resides on a platform that can be rotated around its center in 81 steps. After each movement, the mechanism swaps out the current slide, selecting the next image depending on which direction the user turns. The resulting effect is similar to the implementations of augmented reality you might see today, with a 3d visualization superimposed on the surrounding room.

The concept dates back all the way to the 1860′s, when [John Pepper] first demonstrated the technique. Using mirrors and panes of glass, he was able to project translucent images in front of his audience, which is the same idea [Sebastian] uses in his project. You are likely quite familiar with the effect, if you have ever visited the Haunted Mansion at a Disney theme park.

It’s a neat project, though the resultant augmented reality display is obviously not quite as smooth as you would see from a smartphone. Either way, it is definitely worth checking out. Keep reading to see a video of the project in action.

A new project from [James] targets the iPhone with this wild generative art in an Augmented Reality environment (free) app for 3GS and 4 running running iOS 4+. Powered by the String augmented reality library, and written in C + OpenGL the combo present a power AR platform offering over 100,000 polygons on screen with no noticeable dip in frame rate.

The artistic part is influenced by noise the app is picking up through the microphone. Speaking, whistling or blowing at the device creates 3D generative art, which you are then free to explore in 3 dimensions. It would be interesting to see what it comes up with in a naturally noisy environment. Features also include variety of 3D shapes, color palettes, and settings that can be mixed to create “endless” combinations along with a good to have save snapshot feature.

Join us after the break for a quick video, and be sure to check out some of [James] other work, like  the Augmented reality business card

[Raj Sodhi] and [Brett Jones] have been working on interactive augmented reality as part of their research at the University of Illinois. What they have come up with is a stylus-based input system that can use physical objects to create a virtual landscape. Above you can see that an environment was built using white blocks. A camera maps a virtual world that matches the physical design. From there an infrared stylus can be used to manipulate virtual data which is projected on the blocks.

What they’ve created is a very advanced IR Whiteboard. There are buttons on the stylus, one of which opens the menu, made up of circles that you can see above. From there, you can select a tool and make it do your bidding. After the break there’s a video demonstration where a game is set up, using the menu to place tanks and mines on the 3D playing field. We wonder how hard it would be to do this using a projector and a Kinect.

This robot eye can move five times faster than the human eye. It’s capable of being used to follow a human gaze and, as you can see by that coin, it’s small enough to be used in pairs. When used to follow your gaze it needs a custom-made eye tracker. The thought here is that a lot can be learned about a person’s psyche by monitoring what they are focusing on. But we wonder about the augmented reality properties of a setup like this.

Imagine a pair of glasses as a heads up display. If this camera knows where you’re looking it can process the items in your gaze and overlay digital information. As with all new technology there are obvious military uses for this, but we’d be more interested in a Flickr pool type collection of people’s real-world experiences. Like subscribing to the locations of that thumb drive network in NYC and having the camera/glasses guide you to the nearest installation.

Want to see how fast this thing responds? Check out the video after the break.

[via Neatorama]

Controlling a long-range unmanned aerial vehicle is much easier if you have an augmented reality system like [Fabien Blanc-Paques] built. On board the aircraft you’ll find a sensor suite and camera, both transmitting data back to the operator. As the title of this post indicates, the display the operator sees is augmented with this data, including altitude, speed, and a variety of super-handy information. For instance, if you get disoriented during a flight there’s an arrow that points back to home. There’s also critical information like how many milliamp-hours have been used so that you can avoid running out of juice, and GPS data that can be used to locate a downed aircraft. Check out some flight video after the break.

Scouter is a facial recognition system and head-up display that [Christopher Mitchell] developed for his Master’s Thesis. The wearable device combines the computing power of an eeePC 901 with a Vuzix VR920 wearable display and a Logitech Quickcam 9000. The camera is mounted face-forward on the wearable display like a third eye and the live feed is patched through to the wearer. [Christopher's] software scans, identifies, and displays information about the people in the camera frame at six frames per second.

We can’t help but think of the Gargoyles in Snow Crash. This rendition isn’t quite that good yet, there’s several false positives in the test footage after the break. But there are more correct identifications than false ones. The fact that he’s using inexpensive off-the-shelf hardware is promising. This shouldn’t been too hard to distill down to an inexpensive dedicated system.

Augmented reality is a pretty neat thing but we don’t want to live our lives staring at a smartphone as we walk around. [F00] didn’t either so he built these augmented reality glasses. You can see a hole in the middle of the glasses where he added a webcam. The camera captures the image in front of you, processes it through augmented reality software, then sends the image to the wearable display that makes up the body of this hack. Integrate this into the head-mounted Linux hack and you’ll be able to ride your bike around the real world with your blast shield down instead of being tethered to your trainer in a virtual universe.

[Iain Gildea] tipped us off about a drill-powered coffee grinder he made but it was the floppy-disc augmented reality display a few paragraphs down that caught our attention. He’s taken 36 white floppy discs, sprayed one side black, then mounted them each with a center pivot into a 6×6 grid. Through a convoluted system of pulleys and servo motors the display can be manipulated to produce augmented reality markers. After the break you can see the display itself, then the result of viewing it through a webcam.

We’re amused, but also scratching our heads. There must be an easier way, such as a light-up grid covered in dark plexi or something along those lines. But then again, it’s his hack and he can do what he wants… and he seems to have a thing for floppies.

The physical display being tested.

The augmented view through a webcam.

[Banfield Design] has put together this instructable on how to upgrade or re build a head mounted display to be more immersive and add features.  Though you can already buy glasses style viewers for your media devices, they can use some upgrades. For one, you have to supply your own sound, and putting headphones on, over bulky glasses can be painful on your ears. Another area that could use improvement is the light that comes in around the glasses. The current trend is to make them as small as possible, but that tends to let your peripheral vision see the outside world. [Banfield design] wanted to make them more immersive, so he built them into some ski goggles. This not only helped block the light, but allowed for an over the ear style headphone assembly which is much easier on the ears.

A functional improvement came next, by adding a webcam front and center. He could now switch between a live feed of his environment and whatever other inputs he wanted. This could be really fun with some augmented reality. He has a list of future improvements, but he doesn’t mention adding a second camera for stereoscopic viewing of his surroundings. Why would you do that? because it would make augmented reality much cooler.

[Joe] and his team hacked together some location tracking using IR throwies for their final project. The challenge they undertook was to find a way to track the orientation of a sculpture in the form of a rotating metal cube. The end result dips its toe into the augmented reality pool but the methods are what interest us.

They wanted this to work day or night so contrast would be a major issue if working completely with image manipulation. Having a simple way to pick out the corners of the monotone block would make this process a breeze. They ended up using magnetic throwies that have an infrared LED which can easily be picked up by a webcam no matter what the ambient light issues happen to be.

After the break you can see these guys out in the wild testing the system. We’d like to note the diffusers used in the project. We’re used to seeing ping-pong balls as diffusers but this is the first time we’ve noticed Styrofoam balls being used.