Siggraph thin on AR 2009

Or is it? Hopefully, I will find more time to browse through this year’s siggraph papers soon. Unfortunatelly I couldn’t attend, but as it seems to me, there hasn’t been too much on Augmented Reality this year, maybe we have to stick closer to ISMAR and other conferences for our special interest. There was the before mentioned great idea of Bokode presented, where tags and tracking references are stored inside tiny markers, combined with lenslets, visible to out-of-focus cameras; then there was Fraunhofer’s under water AR scenario, I discussed before. And two more neat things, I’d like to show:

First, an OpenCV and ARTag based hand-gesture-tracking add-on for augmented reality. It’s far away from a useful interaction device, but as I like to repeat: once we have proper equipment (like lightweight HMDs), we need other input paradigms, too! We need to think about gestures soon enough, because I don’t want to connect one of these mice to my wrist, when walking through the street, enjoying AR.

Secondly, another flavour of a virtual mirror. Fraunhofer institute did another presentation at last year’s (was it?) CeBit in Hanover, Germany: there we saw sneakers stuck to your feet. This one, nevertheless, is more impressive, since it not only overlays your regular (real life ;-)) shirt, but also bends and distorts as you twist your body.

Technically, it’s not too crazy, since a rectangular pattern is needed on top of the shirt and a real-time chroma keying does the trick for the color. Also, you can’t (or can you and it’s not shown?) switch to a bright shirt color. Hm. But still, it’s a really great close-to-market-release kind of application, that could stand in your next footlocker or Nike superstore soon enough! I’d see those genius iphone runners as a first target group. :-)

Hoping for more videos popping up soon.