The latter half of the 20th century saw the built environment merged with media space, and architecture taking on new roles related to branding, image and consumerism. Augmented reality may recontextualise the functions of consumerism and architecture, and change in the way in which we operate within it.
A film produced for my final year Masters in Architecture, part of a larger project about the social and architectural consequences of new media and augmented reality.
YDreams augmented-reality platform supports depth-sensing cameras. These types of cameras make it possible to pinpoint the 3D position of the users (it supports multiple users) and objects in the environment, allowing for a true marker less augmented reality experience. The virtual objects added in the video stream react to the user as well as the real objects´ positions and movements.
Unlike similar applications that use 2D cameras, this one is not sensitive to light changes, camera movements and noisy backgrounds. This is a simple demo to exemplify the user experience.
Marco Tempest is an Adventurer, Scientist, Showman, Dreamer and Hero… There’s no one quite like Marco Tempest. His imaginative combination of computer-generated imagery, video, music and stagecraft with his unique vision of future life is creatively unique and unequalled within the performing arts. Marco began performing at a very young age. By the time he was 22, he had captured the prestigious New York World Cup of Magic, launching him into international prominence. The amazing precision and imagination embodied in his work have always set him apart from the crowd. He seems to have an uncanny sense of what would be just right for a given situation…in a meeting, for a particular audience, in a particular setting. Always working to stay just a bit ahead of the curve himself, he has a particularly winning way of taking his audiences with him on his magical excursions into the land of tomorrow.
Technology Magician – Marco Tempest
More info @ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marco_Tempest
More Video @ http://www.youtube.com/user/virtualmagician
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Waking up in the same place every morning is boring.
A great visionary concept from Winscape.
The Maiking Off
Take a look @ http://www.rationalcraft.com/Winscape.html
We believe that the easiest way to change people’s behaviour for the better is by making it fun to do. We call it The fun theory.
Scratch Mat
The world’s deepest bin
Tomglasspelet
Lionhead introduces us to their Project Natal-enabled interactive character named Milo. This demo is from E3 2009.
From UI&us
Microsoft has announced at last years E3 Games conference a new peripheral/system coming next year for the XBox called ‘Natal’. They’ve got some slick prototypes/ studio mockups which show people interacting with games and other applications in a very convincing manner. The technology is based on 3D camera technology which I’ve previously discussed, and it’s good to see it coming to the fore. Microsoft certainly thinks it’s a big deal, pulling out Spielberg and Peter Molyneux to talk up the future.
The promotional material implies that they’ve got some extra processing turning 3D camera bitmap images into models of the human body to be passed to the game itself. Perhaps this processing is the source of the lag between the person and the on-screen action in the video on this page, which I’m guessing is a real prototype. And too much lag and you end up with a cognitively tiring game. The system also boasts speech recognition — I’m skeptical on how effective that will be you’re yelling at the screen. Overall, this new 3D system promises awesome new interaction possibilities, but given the huge hype, expect some post-natal depression if it doesn’t meet expectations.
UPDATE: Natal now has a website.
iTunes link: http://bit.ly/5KH8RV
Available in the App Store now! TwittARound is the original augmented reality Twitter viewer on the iPhone 3GS. It shows live tweets around your location on the horizon. Because of video see-through effect you see where the tweet comes from and how far it is away.
SREngine stands for Scene Recognition Engine, which is a software engine to recognize static scenes of architectures, streets, posters, rooms, and so on. Due to the ability to specify what user is watching in real time in very strict manner, SREngine has applicable to wide range of AR-related applications (AR: Augmented Reality).
