Augmentality

Just saw this … amazing!  I think this would be a fitting business card for me.

via FastCompany

I just ran across this cool video about a company that is embedding facial recognition into a augmented reality browser. Check it out for yourself, good show!

Registration Error Checking

Augmented Reality is far from perfect.  Although the Doritos concert-in-a-bag gimmick running rampant on Twitter the last few days is cool, many people do not understand that augmented reality has a major hinderence.  This hinderence is known as a registration error.

According to the University of North Carolina’s augmented reality lab a registration error comes about when “the real and virtual objects [are not] properly aligned with respect to each other, or the illusion that the two coexist [is] compromised.”

Institutions from around the world are currently tackling this problem.  I recently ran across one such project at Georgia Tech’s Augmented Environment Laboratory called Adaptive Intent-Based Augmentation System (AIBAS).

“The goal of AIBAS (a Adaptive Intent-Based Augmentation System) is to understand how knowledge of the communicative intent of an augmentation can be leveraged to simplify the creation of AR applications that work well in real-world situations with “good enough” tracking and registration. In this project, we hope to demonstrate how such knowledge can be used to reduce the impact of registration errors by supporting the programmer in creating augmentations that contain sufficient visual context for a user to understand the intent of the augmentation.”

In time registration errors will be a thing of the past; however, todays developers are still struggling with this aspect of the technology.  Now, go tell your friends what you learned!

ARToolKit

Many of you have probably already heard of the ARToolKit, but do you know what the source of the augmented reality software library is?  Enter HITLab and the SharedSpace project.

HITLab is a multifunctional research laboratory focused on Human Interface Technology.  SharedSpace is just one of the many projects that HITLab has pursued over the years.  And, the ARToolKit is a product of the project.

Today, many of the gimmicky uses of augmented reality use  toolkits like this.   Thank goodness HITLab gave us ARToolKit.

You can find more about the toolkit and its uses at HITLab’s page dedicated to its promotion here.

Tinmith Project

The Wearable Computer Lab (WCL) of the University of South Australia is a great research lab with many excellent examples of potential augmented reality applicaitons.  If you want to see some great things happening at an amazing labe look no further than WCL.

One of my favorite projects is ARQuake.  It’s exactly what it’s name says, an AR version of Id Software’s legendary game Quake.  Do not miss this.