Buzz with AR Cloth and other Stories
A neat new demo showing Augmented Reality for a virtual dressing room comes from the nice guys from ARBUZZ. Artur Studzinski showed me their work using OpenNI, NITE and XNA – I must have missed it on vimeo before. It shows augmented clothing using the virtual mirror metaphor. But unlike other demos we have seen before, we now have a pretty good prototype showing the combination with a depth cam for registering the bones/body parts. This enables them for new spatial user interfaces and even more importantly: to make use of cloth physics simulation, so that the skirt, pants or sweatshirts moves along with you and is not stuck to one position and feel like made of cement or washed with way too much starch.
The demo video shows the big potential for this use case, though render quality and performance is still rough (funny score though!). But we are on the right track! :-)
Virtual Dressing Room from ARBUZZ on Vimeo.
In other news… it is time for more conferences!
metaio’s fair, the “Inside AR” in Munich on Sept 26-27 finish their early Bird Prices this Friday, July 29th! So grab a ticket now to save some money. It will definitely be another great show in Munich (don’t forget Oktoberfest). metaio is also releasing information on keynote speakers during the next weeks. I.e. they already have confirmed Björn Ekelund, Head of Ecosystems and Research for ST-Ericsson, and lastly announced John Havens, who is a published author and the Executive Vice President of Social Media at Porter Novelli.
I will be showing up, too. So let’s have a chat on location! Just drop me a line before. :-)
Other cool demos
Some of my Facebook followers and active AR browsing people may have seen these before, but I thought they are worth sharing here as well: for one, the nice butterfly demo of sensaa, that actually puts you in an augmented virtuality world. The demo is a bit rough as well, but the concept is fun:
Talking about great concepts…
…we (possibly) will have another nice way of killing time during long car rides for your (grand) children. Quoting on the Toyota youtube appearance:
The window can lets onlookers zoom in on objects they see outside, and it can translate and identify objects in another language. Augmented reality can help viewers gauge the distance of landmarks, and it can also help them identify constellations in the sky. Of course, these features are just a concept, but in the future windows could be the next computer screen.
Finally…
The “Inch High Stunt Guy” is an Augmented Reality Game for Android based on the AR SDK from Qualcomm, that comes pretty funny alowing level design through object placement on your table (I keep being reminded of my old AR:RACE ;-)).
… and if you want to experience the world like Geordi La Forge you can check out this neat HMD experiment! Additionally you get an uncoupled virtual position from your physical one letting you stumble through another representation of the world. Confused? Me too. :-)