Augmented Reality in Museums
By Charles Arthur guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 15 July 2009 19.30 BST
Another layer of reality? A 3D Canon dinosaur
As the players pause between ends in a match at Wimbledon, the TV screen suddenly overlays the court with a pattern of yellow and black dots - showing where the receiver has been returning the first and second serves. As they walk back out, the overlay vanishes and they're back to play.
As another wicket falls in the Ashes, a replay shows the flight of the ball, and how it was going to clip the off-stump before it was stopped by the batsman's leg. And in the US, TV viewers watching an American football match see a yellow line running across the field - the "first down line" that the attacking team must reach to retain possession. Except that it's invisible to the players on the field: it's added in the TV studios. And this weekend's Open Championship golf will show the greens overlaid with contours, revealing the territory each putt must negotiate.
All are examples - already so familiar as to feel quotidian - of "augmented reality" (AR), a burgeoning field that mixes computer power with real life to add extra information to a scene or event. The sports examples are only the beginning, relying as they do on static locations. The next generation of augmented reality is designed for people on the move - and it's already being implemented.
For example, spectators visiting the All-England club this year with an Android-powered phone could download an AR application called Wimbledon Seer, which, when they held the phone up and pointed it at the courts, would display match data, where the refreshment stands were, or whether a cafe had an exceptionally long line.
Unlike virtual reality, or immersive reality (think Second Life), AR takes what is already there in the real world and uses computer sensing to add more information - whether in touch ("haptic"), visual or aural formats.
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Like green screen...?
Submitted by MotionSimulations on Mon, 08/03/2009 - 15:18.The way this technology seems to function is somewhat like green screen photography in the way that it manipulates the information of the given environment to produce a different image. I look forward to further developments in this incredibly interesting technology.
The principle behind
Submitted by marcbe on Tue, 08/18/2009 - 18:06.The principle behind augmented reality is different from the green screen approach while you could say that the end result does share some similitude indeed. They both merge a real environment part with a virtual one.
The system shown in this article uses special viewfinder devices which tell a computer where they are standing in free space. With this information, the computer calculates what side of the dinosaur the viewer would see from that angle. It then overlay that dinosaur image on the real scene. Since the viewfinder is see-through, it allows the user to see the real world. The computer only draws the dinosaur part on top of the real scenery. So in some way, it is the opposite principle of green screens, where a background is added to part of a real scene.
Marc Bernatchez
President
Virtual Simulations, Inc