AR Demos@RTT Excite, Racing Game and Full Body Tracking

Dear Reader,

I’ve been quite offline lately due to the preparations for our own conference, that took place on May 6th+7th in Munich. It was a great show with two days and two floors packed with live demos and interesting talks. (Luckily Pixar didn’t claim that Stereoscopic3D is everything, but rather a small piece in making a great movie. But that’s what I expected. ;-))

We showed lots of demos and also a couple of augmented and mixed reality demos. The most simple (but still great) demo I wanted to share with you today, so that you can see the quality we get with an off-the-shelf laptop and a webcam. Spiced up with some catchy tune behind. ;-) Enjoy!

The car for instance holds about 1.000.000 polygons with dozens of shaders and was rendered with 30 fps. The laptop was a regluar Dell Latitude and the usual suspect camera (Logitech Pro9000).

As soon as the press material from the film crew is ready I hope I can show you more videos, e.g.:

• Photoshooting Set Previsualization
  The second demo I hosted is intended to be used for a photographer or film crew that needs to shoot backplates (background images of landscapes, streets, …) for commercial productions. This process is currently quite annoying for the creative guys since in 99% of the cases they won’t have a physical car (or whatever product to photograph) on site. This makes planning a shot pretty hard. The integration of the CG car will only happen later in the postproduction. With AR we can now give the live preview to the crew on location and automatically import SLR images or HD feeds and export the camera angles for postproduction.
• Virtual Photostudio
  The third AR/MR demo is a mixed reality application to set up a virtual photostudio. Markers can be touched physically and represent light sources, that can easily be re-arranged to light the object of interest without the need of touching complicated GUIs of any rendering tool. The demo makes use of full raytracing to get the light and reflections right. So, stay tuned for a video update.

So, but that’s enough talk on the stuff from RTT. Now let’s enjoy the short holiday (at least in Germany) and be back next week! To pass the time be sure to:

check out the augmented reality racing game from TU München and

take a look Project Natal’s competitor Omek InterActive with their body controls. They offer the same full body motion tracking with a depth-sensing camera and process it in real-time. There will be a SDK, so that you and me as a developer can access the system and hook it up to your specific software.