augmented reality

115 Articles

Hackaday Links: December 7 2009

December 7, 2009 by 20 Comments

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Ah the beauty of watching molten solder pull SMD components into place. Yeah, we’ve seen it before, but for some reason it never gets old.

The glory days of wardriving are certainly behind us but if you’re still hunting in certain areas for access points you can leave the laptop at home. A homebrew program called Road Dog can turn your PSP into a WiFi search device. You must be able to run custom code to use this app.

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Ferrofluid is our friend. But having grown up watching the Terminator and Hellraiser movies we can’t help being a little creeped out by the effects seen in this movie.

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Follow along with the NASA astronauts in this 20 minute HD tour of the international space station. It’s a cramped place to live but we can’t help thinking that it looks incredibly clean. After all, where would the dirt come from?

How are your woodworking skills?  Can you take a wooden block and turn it on a lathe until you have a lampshade 1/32″ thick? We’d love to see how these are made, but imagine the artist’s reaction when hours of labor are ruined by a minuscule amount of misplaced pressure on a carving tool. Patience, we’ll learn it some day!

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This video from the past that is about the future of  travel does leave us wondering why our cars don’t have built-in radar for poor visibility? We’ve already realized the rear-view-mirror-tv-picture, but we’re going to need your help before the flying police/fire/ambulance-mobile is a common sight. Oh, the fun of seeing a high-tech push-button selector 3:30 into the video. Perhaps the touch-screen was a bit beyond the vision of the time.

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Sometimes you have so many servants you need to find creative things for them to do. Only the most discriminating of the super-rich employ a person whose sole responsibility is to erase and redraw the hands of a clock each minute. This video is obviously a result of the global recession as the live time-keeper has been let go; a looping recording took his job!

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Last time we checked in with [Marco Tempest] he was syncing video over multiple iPhones. Now he’s at it again with an augmented reality setup. A camera picks up some IR LEDs in a canvas and translates that into information for a video projector. We’d call this a trick, but it’s certainly not magic.

Pool-playing Robot + ARpool

September 20, 2009 by 14 Comments

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Enjoy losing at pool? Well the folks at Queen’s University just made it a whole lot easier. The Deep Green robot was created with the purpose of playing a flawless game, allowing it to beat even the most skilled human players. More than a couple of research papers have been written on the project. A ceiling-mounted Canon 350D tracks the position of all of the balls, in addition to another cue-mounted cam (for higher shot accuracy). Using a bunch of calculations, and a computer (probably more advanced than an Arduino), the Deep Green is able to strategize and play. Very well.

On a positive note, another team from Queens is working on a seperate but related project: ARpool (as in augmented reality). It was created to make playing pool easier. The website does not provide much info, but it seems to project different moves onto the pool table, allowing an inexperienced player to tell whether a shot is at all possible.

Arduino + Augmented Reality

August 28, 2009 by 23 Comments

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In this video you can see the marriage of Arduino data collecting units and Augmented reality systems. Set up by the people at pachube.com, a site for sharing sensor information from your location, this is an interesting idea. We can see that each unit has its own pattern, so it can have the data it is collecting superimposed on it in 3d. While this is really cool looking, we’re still trying to figure out what the use of this is? Who is going to be wandering around their office with a camera hooked to a computer? Maybe this is meant more for phones, so you can get quick readings off of the units without having to go access their logs. Since we know how much you guys absolutely love the Arduino, we though you might also be interested in this larger than life portrait we saw floating around.

[via littlebirdceo]

AR Flash Library Released

July 21, 2009 by 11 Comments

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[onezerothrice] has been working hard on creating ARtisan, a flash library for bringing augmented reality to the browser. His goal in creating the library was to make AR projects quicker and easier to develop. The library can provide the location, size, and rotation of multiple markers on screen with little work from the developer. It is licensed under the GPL and comes bundled with Papervision3D, another flash library for manipulating objects in 3 dimensions. He has posted several demos with source and accompanying video.

Augmented Reality Business Card

July 15, 2009 by 20 Comments

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Embedded above is a neat augmented reality business card by ActionScript developer [James Alliban]. After seeing “the most impressive business card you will ever see“, he was inspired to update his own business card. His new card has a fiduciary marker on the backside and directs you to his site. A flash app on the site displays a video where he tells you more about himself. The 3D grid of planes in the video varies in depth based on the brightness of the section. He has a few more AR and tracking demos on Vimeo.

Updated: While we’re talking augmented reality, it’s worth checking out the tech behind ESPN’s baseball tracker that uses doppler radar.

Related: Augmented reality in Flash

[via Josh Spear]

Global Hackdays: Tangible Interfaces

May 26, 2009 by 1 Comment

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June 6th is the date of the upcoming Global Hackday. This time, focusing on cheap tangible interfaces, mainly trackmate. They want as many people to join as possible, even if you’re not comfortable with code. We’ve covered the construction of the trackmate surface before, now build one and get in there and contribute.

Wearable Projector Adds Info To Everyday Activities

March 10, 2009 by 14 Comments

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[Pattie Maes] from MIT’s Media Lab showed a really interesting augmented reality demo at TED this year. It’s a wearable projector that lets you interact with any surface. A camera tracks the gestures your fingertips make and performs related actions. She shows several uses: projecting a dial pad on your hand, displaying additional info on a product you’re holding, and taking a picture when you form a frame with your hands. The current equipment cost is $350, but that would be reduced in a dedicated device.

[via Waxy]