Nokia shows us their Augmented Reality Vision

Please take a look at the fresh AR video, created by Nokia, that just went online. It is a pretty high quality production (well, it’s Nokia!), comparable to Microsoft’s interaction vision video. The video shows mixed reality (projection onto your living room, i.e. here the window) and AR goggles with gaze and finger gesture interaction. Unfortunately it’s not a near future scenario (or what is going on in their secret labs?), but it’s great to see high quality visualizations to convince everybody of the ideas and to get the hardware research rolling (well, more rolling).

The video does not show too much, though. Especially it does not show how the person interacts with the fingers (how are the gestures tracked?) and how the person would use the system for typing. (Selection of emotion done by gaze, but do we really can/want to type staring at letters?) But nevertheless, worth a look. A great piece of concept. Enjoy!

In other news…

AR Wiki

An augmented reality wiki just went online under www.AugmentedRealityWiki.com. Please go and check it out and contribute. I’m not sure if a special wiki is needed or it would be easier to just get a whole set of AR related topics inside of wikipedia going. Nevertheless, it shows that AR awareness is rising and that 2009 is the year of augmentation. :-)

AR Flashlight

Another new demo comes from fellow Bavarians from the Fraunhofer institute in Munich, showing a concept of an AR flashlight. It’s a pico projector combined with a webcam allowing to augmented your view through projected AR. I’m genereally keen on this concept, so have a look, too. Nicely done is the triggering of a button by holding your finger ontop of it for a second, waiting for a progress bar to fill up – to avoid accidental pushes.