Projector Introduces Augmented Reality To Reality

November 19, 2010 by Mike Szczys 8 Comments

[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.

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Robot Eyes Look Where You Do

November 5, 2010 by Mike Szczys 35 Comments

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.

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Augmented Reality UAV Controller

September 10, 2010 by Mike Szczys 45 Comments

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.

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Head-up Uses Facial Recognition And Augmented Reality

August 2, 2010 by Mike Szczys 25 Comments

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.

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Augmented Reality Glasses

April 19, 2010 by Mike Szczys 28 Comments

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.

Floppy Disk Augmented Reality Is A Head-scratcher

March 23, 2010 by Mike Szczys 23 Comments

[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.

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HMD Upgrade

February 15, 2010 by Caleb Kraft 18 Comments

[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.