Hybrid Tracking & World Expo Highlights

Hi guys,

I guess by today all you developers out there have downloaded and tested metaio6, too. metaio put a nice summarizing video online, that I wanted to share today. It takes a closer look at the newly introduced hybrid tracking, that runs their tracking methods in parallel and uses “whatever works best for the moment”.

If you don’t know what this is about, let me go over it quickly. The two tracking variants used are the well-known feature based 3D tracking (using SLAM) and the younger edge-based tracking:

the first was a big success to finally get rid of the two-dimension limitation and printed markers or magazine covers. One could finally track sculptures, toy models, even outdoor large-scale buildings through this new tracking approach. But the problem with it remains: objects need a pretty diffuse surface with texture and lighting conditions need to be almost static to work well. So, the flip side is that no polished, shiny or un-textured surfaces work well. Lighting must not change.

The newer approach (first introduced in metaio5 beta for initialization) was the edge-based tracking, that uses a pre-teached reference CAD model. So tracking runs on contours rather than point cloud features. This way it was much more resilient to changing light conditions, but only covers what does not work well for feature-based…

So along comes hybrid! metaio states a very high accuracy and robustness, and a system re-initialization that is almost immediately. So now see for yourself:

I’m very happy that they included it in metaio 6 and we can profit from it directly. Tracking objects both from distance and at close range becomes possible with one single configuration running. We do our demos mostly on shiny cars, so we finally have what we were looking for! Known robustness but now also on shiny pieces! Neat!!

Augmented World Expo

This year’s Augmented World Expo was a big success again and they put up a short overview with high class quotes from the industry. Check it out below, if you couldn’t attend:

Have a great start into December and survive the X-Mas chaos!

Toby.