That's me at work with my little monster-friend.
The concept of augmented-reality (AR) is not all that new. A few years back I remember reading about an AR Pacman game that used cameras, goggles, and GPS (find out more here). Even more recently, as of a few weeks ago, Gizmodo had a short video of a Japanese AR girlfriend (check it out here). This brings me to yesterday, when I came across a Flash-based AR program by Digital Pictures Interactive that uses your webcam and a printed garphic to “project” a little, three-eyed monster into the palm of my hand–figuratively of course.
The Flash file uses your webcam and the graphic to determine where to place the monster, and how to orient him. As you rotate the graphic, you will see the monster rotate as well. Check out the video, and try it out yourself, if you have a webcam, here: PaperVision - Augmented Reality.
After playing around with it on and off for an hour or so today, I started to wonder how soon it would be until we were seeing more AR in everyday things–games, action figure playsets, etc. It’s as simple as having a head-mounted camera, and a screen–in this case, I’d expect them to be a pair of goggles and a small lense on the bridge of your nose. Think about that–how cool would it be to be playing a videogame that actually took place in your home! Like, miniature-sized humans vs aliens all over your living room. You could command your characters via voice command, or by control. Or a GI-Joe playset where you could actually see your “Joes” running around a base that you built yourself, as they wait for your friend’s Cobra army to attack it? Or how about a throw-back to Star Wars, and their futuristic game of chess?
Of course, you couldn’t actually “touch” your AR characters in any way, but, you’d still be interacting with them by getting them to move where you tell them to move, or act like you’d like them to act. The possibilities are pretty exciting, and I really hope this comes to fruition.
I was really geeked about all this AR stuff in the feeds lately, and thought I’d rant a little 