Augmented Reality Ex Nihilo

December 28, 2011 by Brian Benchoff 13 Comments

[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.

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[Ben Krasnow] Sticks LEDs In His Contacts Just For Kicks

December 20, 2011 by Mike Nathan 86 Comments

[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.

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Seeing With Another Person’s Eyes

November 23, 2011 by Brian Benchoff 9 Comments

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.

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Classic Game Cabinet Becomes A Drivable Car

August 2, 2011 by Brian Benchoff 40 Comments

[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.

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Augmented Reality Game Could Come From The Seventies

July 5, 2011 by Brian Benchoff 19 Comments

[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.

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Building An Augmented Reality Display Using Obsolete Technology

April 6, 2011 by Mike Nathan 10 Comments

slideprojector_augmented_reality

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.

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Whistle To Make The Art Flow

April 1, 2011 by Kevin Dady 3 Comments

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

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