Reality Augmented, Virtually
Wagner James Au has a brilliant post on New World Notes about a project at Georgia Tech called AR Second Life, which integrates Augmented Reality features into the open source Second Life client.
Last summer, Ian blogged here on Eightbar about an experiment with running the ARTag system alongside Second Life, and augmenting SL with additional 3D content, like this…
The Georgia Tech project goes the other way, augmenting the real world with live content from SL. Like this…
It hints at a future in which the lines between virtual worlds and real world will be crossed by more than just the use of a keyboard, mouse and monitor combination. The ability to see and interact with other people in virtual worlds is one of the things that has allowed interest in 3D environments to expand far beyond what we ever saw back in the days of (largely single-user) ‘virtual reality’. Being able to go beyond clunky user interfaces and blend those interactions naturally and intuitively with the real world is something I expect we’ll see a lot more of this year.
January 16th, 2008 at 20:44
I was going to post the same comment on the YT vid (re: ARTag) and also mention Reactable since it seemed to have a connection on that front, but got lazy. Nice to see someone else had the “goes the other way” thought.
January 17th, 2008 at 10:42
It is indeed very cool. I was hoping someone would do this with the open source client (The gpl licence makes it hard for us to have a go as employees) , and if we also add the Wiimote code in there too it makes a very cool mashup that people will find a lot of applications for.
January 25th, 2008 at 19:23
[...] Artag has come up again recently in a few posts. I was just getting an older webcam working my laptop so I used Artag to see if it was working ok and did this little render test. In this case with a head model of me generated by cyberextruder from a 2d photo. It looses registration a bit but as I said it was an old camera. [...]