Tracking patterns are out of fashion focus

The gyus from the MIT present a new stunning way to hide markers and barcodes inside tiny pinholes (yes! the small hole next to the old fashioned markers on the left!). When you compare its size with regular markers, it’s pretty amazing and scary, how good they can hide technology to the human eye, but still obtain information visually. A small prism lens is fixed in front of the pattern and an “out-of-focus camera” will deliver the pattern in-focus, inside of the bokeh effect of your lense! It’s damn clever. Their demo for augmented reality tracking works amazingly good. Gotta see it on a field test, though. I guess even for the people at the MIT it’s still pretty hard to track a 12 Megapixel SLR image in real-time and some other restrictions are there (e.g. it’s always more effort and costly to glue a tiny lenslet behind your paperhole – instead of just printing a pattern…) But hopes are up! :-) Be sure to check it out at the Siggraph 09!

See it at youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wG7vXI1I1wg