RTT Excite Review of AR

Hi everybody!

I’m finally back alive after some stressful but interesting cool days! Our big conference is now over with over 900 participants and two days packed with high tech demos, including the AR and mixed reality demos and the talk from Keiichi, Irina from metaio and myself on Augmented visions and current R&D. I guess, it’s a bit difficult to write unbiased on the event myself, but nevertheless I will give a quick overview of the AR related demonstrations we had! (Videos with the demos will be available during the next weeks.)

I’m very happy to get your stories by mail, comments or facebook entries, if you’ve been there and like to add your thoughts! OK, here we go with my favorite four in a short gallery overview style!

Interieur Design with AR

This demo uses a real car as the canvas for 3D augmentations. With marker placements inside the interieur you can customize your car. Place markers to exchange the gear shift, the navigation system, etc. A great way to show how we can easily interact with the computer data within the real space and overlay this with additional information. Customizing and previewing your own version of a product is a big deal and this demo helped to define a possible version of it.

Canon Mixed Reality HMD Demo

We are cooperating with Canon and their R&D to make use of their HMD setups and their own mixed reality tools. The combination of their hard- and software with our 3D renderer shows a very cool way (sorry, I’m biased) of a virtual product (in this case a car) experience. The great thing is, that the stereoscopic video-see-through HMD has a great visual feel when wearing it: Canon has found the right optical lens setup (well, they are Canon) to give you the illusion of actually looking through the video cameras without offsets. Moreover their tracking is pretty robust (markers on the floor plus gyro-sensors within the HMD) and fully real-time responsive. There was no lag at all. Can’t wait to have Canon release their HMD into the wild!

tabletAR with Real-Time Lighting and Reflections

Our developers put up another demo, running finally on an Android Asus Transformer tablet: the virtual car will be rendered on a big workstation and gets reflection, lighting and surrounding information from a connected spherical camera (the Ladybug3). With this combination we are able to get real-time data to work with our renderer: we update reflection, image-based lighting on the go and also add some noise and other filters to have a great match of virtual to real. Finally all gets streamed to a tablet, giving a light-weighted access to the virtual window.

Projection-based Augmented Reality

Last but not least: the demo our team and myself prepared in joint forces with Extend3D. We wanted to take the other way round: to bring the virtual stuff really into the real space to get a haptic feedback and a natural interaction. You wouldn’t need glasses or a tablet at all. The projection based augmented reality has always been one of my favorite approaches, and I’m very glad we could put this up first time for the conference! I’ve been always posting projection mapping videos from around the world, but the difference is: with the integrated tracking we can now easily move the object (here with markers) or also the projection system itself during run-time! Thus we can spin the objects around or move the projector to another side pointing at the real white object – always giving the correct overlay of the 3D information!

We’ve shown two demos here: a 1:18 Camaro model, that changes laquer and turns on and off head-lights, blinker, etc. You could preview your designs, overlay maintenance information, etc. The second demo is an adidas shoe, colored white (with a diffuse finish to get the best reflections in all directions). You can customize the looks in real-time and we hope to see it in stores someday… just put on one dummy show and preview all personalized versions without switching! :-) The best feedback we got was, when people first went passed our booth, thinking “well, there is a colorful shoe on a table, so what?” … when only they realized, that it was projected on! :-)

Well, ok, that’s all for today. I hope I could give a good sneak wrap-up. Hope to get videos online soon!
Allright, see you next time!

PS. If you happen to be in Munich: join us next week Tuesday (8th of May) for our next Stammtisch!