I’ve been thinking about Augmented Reality a fair bit lately, provoked by a hood-up daydream about how nice it would be to have annotated pop-ups describing the fobs and greebling on my car’s engine, and Tom Armitage’s nibbles about the merit of low-rez AR actually being better than high-rez make a lot of sense:
was struck by how well-suited the blue-on-blue, information-dense and highly representational display of Defcon is as an aesthetic for augmented reality. It helps to have a clear distinction between the real and the augmented. By making the augmented several degrees lower in fidelity than the real, it enhances the utility of the augmented elements. It creates seams between the real and the unreal, and helps the user process both real-world and AR information faster.
Commercial 3D laser scanning systems are tens of thousands of dollars still. I wonder if there would be any way to do a Good Enough version with something that was measuring distance and a couple of stereo cameras. (I won’t be doing it, but perhaps you’re not inept.)
ClubLimbo’s link is a good one! The key to the cheap 3d laser scanner is the David Laserscanner software… and it has a free version!
http://www.david-laserscanner.com/
I’m seriously tempted to mess around with this. Oh, I wish I had more time.
My uncle was doing some AR stuff for his PhD a number of years ago, and coming across this GE site: http://ge.ecomagination.com/smartgrid/
They call it a ‘digital hologram’ and give you the template to print out, but it is based on FLARkit and they even have a nice link to the source code site: http://www.libspark.org/wiki/saqoosha/FLARToolKit/en
I saw a few apps like this built for the Android platform, but I don’t know if they were ever run successfully on actual hardware. The demos were really cool.
So, the niftiness is spreading…
I’d love to have persistent reality augmenting devices similar to the HUDs in most games these days. My top features would be:
-Clock
-Compass
-Waypoint markers on compass (For example, the little markers that show up on your compass in Fallout 3)
I wear glasses, so the platform seems obvious. Ideally, the waypoint feature could be integrated with the common mapping programs on phones. Obviously, all these features exist on stuff I carry now, but they would be more useful if I could have them in my field of vision most of the time.
There was an episode of Systm titled “Build a 3D Scanner From A $25 Laser Level”