Following our post on Desktop Augmented Reality we now have a working verson
Friday again so another urban Line Rider movie – this time the guy on the sledge travel across the cityscape listening to ‘Anytime’ by Eve 6, posted on YouTube by supertod:
Take a look at the tutorial by clawz114 below to get an idea of the complexity behind making these movies:
If you make your own Urban Line Rider scene let us know.. you can start by going to the Line Rider site.
See our Line Rider series for more urban Line Rider sledging..
Augmented Reality used to be in the realms of high-end research labs, limited to virtual reality headsets and motion sensors. As with all technology it filters down over time to the home user, yet despite interesting advancements Augmented Reality has yet to go main stream.
It is however remarkable how easy it is to implement with just a standard webcam and some open source software. Over the coming weeks we will be taking a closer look at creating your own Augmented Reality, specifically for visualising urban areas via augmented maps.
The demo below illustrates the level of output possible:
Of note is how Augmented Reality almost made the consumer breakthrough via the sadly defunct Gizmondo handheld console:
With the introduction of the camera for the Playstation Portable it is possible that the concept will again see the light of day on a console.
Simple, low cost Agumented Reality has direct applications for both the teaching of geography in the classroom as well as higher end planning/architecture descion making and depending on how the next week goes we should have some more info and a tutorial online shortly.
Thanks go to to Chris Hinton at Demontfort University who demonstrated the concept at a meeting on Virtual Leicester and who has been writing his own code to enhance the software.
For more background information on the processes behind Augmented Reality see ‘A City-Planning System based on Augmented Reality with a Tangible Interface by Hirokazu Kato, Keihachiro Tachibana, Masaaki Tanabe, Takeaki Nakajima and Yumiko Fukuda of Osaka University, Hiroshima City University, Knack Images Production Center and Hiroshima Institute of Technology (Pdf Document).
As camera resolutions increase so does the demand to visualise high resolution visuals over the web – this is especially true in terms of panoramas due to their creation using multiple imagery.
We have released our own simple solution from our lab using Google Maps – see GMap Image Creator and now Microsoft has taken this a notable step further. The research lab at Microsoft notes that:
HD View was developed with a number of goals in mind. It should:
- allow smooth panning and zooming on large images,
- only download enough data to create the current view (and possibly look ahead to the next), and
- always display the current field of view with an appropriate projection. This means that when zoomed way in you should be presented with a standard perspective projection providing a sense of immersion, and when zoomed out you experience a curved projection so that get a full overview of the scene. In between the projection should smoothly transition.
- Finally, it should be easy to create your own HD View content and present it to the world via the web.
The movie below provides an excellent overview on not only HD View but also the capturing and stitching process in general:
At the moment HD View is an ActiveX® browser component, thus the first time you use it you will be asked to install the component. It also only runs in Internet Explorer® under the Microsoft Windows® operating system.
For working examples see the sites using it so far – we hope to have our own examples online shortly…