mobile focus and AR zombies at a great metaio fair

Yesterday metaio held their annual fair to show us their new developments and technologies live and interactively with the biggest fair they set up so far. 200 registered AR enthusiasts stormed their bright new offices to be overwhelmed with marker symbols, markeless tracking, applications, concepts and hardware presentations. I consider the day at their headquarters a big success and a nice event to meet AR people from all over the world. Let’s see, if they will put comments on it up in their blogs. But now I’d like to mention some cool things I’ve seen.

In an interesting welcome-introduction by Peter Meier and Thomas Alt they clearly put emphasis on the mobile scenario and that it’s the perfect device to do augmented reality. It’s the first time a consumer product integrates all different kinds of technology in a handy form factor. Clearly, metaio will focus on this idea more and quite a few demos could be seen using mobile phones, including a glance at junaio (later on).

I didn’t count the numerous demos, but every room was packed with new technology, AR prototypes and ideas. I will only list a few, since we (at the AR blogosphere) probably heard about Unifeye Design, magic card games, magic book concepts, their workflow engine, measure tools, furniture clients and the robotic arms fine-grain tracking systems before. :-)

Most interesting for me was their ongoing research on marker-free 3D tracking. During a calibration step some reference pictures of real geometry (a machine, a building) are taken and processed, extracting and aligning features found in the shots. Afterwards their tracking engine could find the camera’s position fast and robust. Translations and rotations didn’t have a significant impact or had different robustness during the demo, shown with a off-the-shelf tabletPC. We’ve seen this before, but the level it reaches 2009 is compelling and lets me already dream about a completely tracked downtown area, where GPS is still too inaccurate (and always will be). Unfortunately, it will take a little while longer, since too many feature points will slow down performance (esp. initialization, currently around 500 iirc). But we know, where we are heading (as usual a good comparison is Microsoft’s Photosynth in this area of 3D reconstruction).

As I said, a lot of production obviously went into their mobile platform and upcoming Unifeye mobile SDK. Fresh from R&D at metaio came the possibility to use a not-so-great Symbian phone, doing 2D feature tracking and showing a neat 3D object. We can see where they are taking us! To see their optimized algorithms on this already-pathetic hardware run smoothly was great, although poly count for 3D models is kept low and rendering, as usual on phones, has yet to improve. But besides there, of course, demos on the latest smartphones, including the iphone junaio demo: it seems to become a great AR browser, that displays social information on the go. They especially stress the social part of it, already today combining and integrating with pages as flickr, facebook, etc really nicely. Even if you don’t own an expensive smartphone you can participate. On the one hand, allowing fun acts as taking augmented snapshots and enriching photos and sights, but on the other the “regular” AR browser concept of adding air tags, to get directions, information, rankings for restaurants, etc. Unfortunately we couldn’t yet see the live camera AR system, but only through taken pictures and nobody was allowed to document their current status, but everything will be in your nearest AppStore on Nov, 2nd. Expect a bigger preview at ISMAR in Orlando! Special focus was laid on the GUI and the user experience as to foster actual augmentation – not only for show, but for the really added value through AR. But we have to be patient to see more of this one today…

What I like about metaio is the modularity of their software and the spread onto different devices and systems. A nice touch was the already-known web-based approach, but now I could see it done in Adobe Director’s tools, so that a web agency has little effort integrating AR into a scenario. Even physics were shown and AR seems to be usable with the flick of a switch.

The next thing I like about the crazy fellow Bavarians is their sense of humor, showing every guest as either Obama or chancellor Merkel. I don’t know why… but I turned out as Merkel. Maybe they integrated a brainwave decoder and displayed what is going on in the people’s heads! (The day before the German People re-elected Merkel.) Another neat add-on to metaio’s tracking portfolio, for sure. But maybe with other 3D heads in the future!

And finally we were able to shoot zombies, crawling out of the gutter in a set-up horror room. This tech demo showed the capabilities of today’s smartphones and their mobile SDK. Another crazy idea these guys put up in no-time, but with too many crawling undead, it was more of a fire-and-forget situation. The rendering was too slow for an interactive experience, but positioning (using the G-sensor and computer vision for sideway movements tracking) went well.

I know this has only been a shallow abstract of the fair, but I hope I can get back to it and post a video or two. Gotta catch my flight now.

Thanks a lot to Peter, Thomas and their big team for the insight and driving AR technology!! (Ah, yeah, and thanks for the great time at the Oktoberfest, too! Maybe a Stein of beer less would have been enough. ;-))