[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.
[vimeo=http://vimeo.com/12154930]
This would be awesome for D&D!!
Someone needs a better system to do this than the Crappy WiiMote way. WiiMotes are a PITA to setup completely every single time you want to do this, they will not stay connected to the pc.
what software do you use? I usually don’t have problems.
it was kinda cool but i think they could expand on the augmented reality part
like being able to track a real object and have a virtual one follow it
with this system you wouldn’t need those lame symbols for the augmented reality
an easy thing to do would be something like a breakout game with a real ball and virtual blocks to break, or maybe even a pinball game that changes the playfield acording to what you’ve hit
this isnt anything special. looks just like a version of the laser graffiti hacks just projecting onto the input surface with a fancy gui
Very cool. +1 to Todd for the D&D idea. :)
I like the idea that the multipurpose the projector for the point cloud modeling
The D&D comment reminds me of a tabletop display I saw a while back, it used markers to represent players and they had a game setup with a fixed move radius, traps, pitfalls, etc. It was very D&D feeling, maybe 3.5 rules by some stuff I saw. Anyway back on topic this would be nice if it didn’t need to scan each surface before use, or had a database of scanned surfaces that you could pull up and use. Honestly a wall isn’t going to change that much from place to place under normal circumstances. It’s a neat idea but the gravity-defying physics they use seems too video-gamey. Great for certain situations (gravity distortion anybody?) but not all. An option to “stick to the surface” or “bounce of objects” would be killer.