Daily Nerd Couture/Geek Chic (Augmented Reality)

T-Post is a magazine from Sweden that delivers the news of the world..with a T-Shirt. Every issue subscribers get a sleek fresh smelling magazine and a cool and perhaps trendy article of clothing. This month the magazine shipped with the shirt pictured above. WHY is it cool? you may be asking yourself….Because it’s an augmented reality T-Shirt!

Augmented Reality is a live merger of the real world and virtual via computer enhanced elements and is currently an emerging technology field. Integration can be visual, tactile or olfactory for augmentation. The most common application at the moment is using a fiduciary marker and a webcam to display to the user a 3D object which can then be rotated in the display by rotating the marker. Most people have been made family through an Assassins Creed II promotion, though this method has spread down to retail ads. Even the city around us isn’t safe from a little augmenting , a building in Japan uses QRCodes, an iphone and twitter feeds to interactively display what is happening inside the building in real-time! Using this technology coupled with  shops, stores, bus stops, etc. people could interact using a mobile device (perhaps some sort of sunglasses HUD) to receive up-to-date information pertaining to their environment! For example, you could scan the QR-Code of a shop you are passing by to know what sales were going on inside or scan a bus stop to track what time the next bus would arrive or you could even make a dinner reservation at a restaurant just by walking or driving by the place.

I have gotten a little ahead of myself in this piece, in fact I outright lied at one point. Most people haven’t been introduced to reality augmentation through the Assassins Creed marketing effort, but in fact have been watching reality become augmented though believe it or not, sports broadcasting. How many football games has the average American seen? Hundreds at the very least. Meaning most Americans have seen the wondrous technology of the “1st and Ten” system. The bright yellow first down down is not an easy object to project onto a flied where there is a live game going on with multiple camera angles. The system works through a complex system involving special camera rigs, a 3d model of the stadium mapped with the locations of all the cameras, complex algorithms to compute when a live objects pass in-front of the line,at least 4 guys, a trailer full of equipment and much more. The system has been intact since 1998 when it was debuted during a Ravens/Bengals game.

Going back even further to the origin of the term “Augmented Reality” we must explore the background of one Tom Caudell who first coined the term. Back in 1990 Tom worked at Boeing where he developed a system to help guide workers attaching wires in airplanes. Tom and friend David Mizell were charged with developing a new system to replace the very expensive system that Boeing was using involving using large pieces of wood with individually designed guides for each plane with a head mounted display that projected the instructions to the user on reusable boards. This would replace the need to constantly manually reconfigure the large pieces of plywood for each step of the design process. If the idea ever came to fruition at Boeing I am not sure, but over at BMW they are aiming to ship out augmented reality glasses to help repairmen fix BMW’s to a standard. Check out the video below for an example of just how practical augmented reality can really be:

Getting back on track however, over at MIT they have developed an augmented reality interface for using your own hands (or other surface) as an input device.  This augmented reality system is named the SixthSense and was developed though MIT Media Lab’s Fluid Interfaces Group. The system uses a Smartphone, camera, a mirror, a small projector and a lanyard. Strung together to create a long necklace the smart-phone acts as the brains and computing power of the operation while the projector projects the interface onto the mirror which reflects the image onto your hand, table, wall, dashboard or anywhere while the camera captures your movements and sends them back to the smart-phone for analysis. The user also wears 4 large colored caps on the tips of their fingers allowing the system to decipher your movements, but creators claim that just different colored nail polish would work as well! If you can’t picture this in your head look below for visual affirmation that your not crazy:

…the device works by using the camera and mirror to examine the surrounding world, feeding that image to the phone (which processes the image, gathers GPS coordinates and pulls data from the Internet), and then projecting information from the projector onto the surface in front of the user, whether it’s a wrist, a wall, or even a person. Because the user is wearing the camera on his chest, SixthSense will augment whatever he looks at; for example, if he picks up a can of soup in a grocery store, SixthSense can find and project onto the soup information about its ingredients, price, nutritional value — even customer reviews.

Even video games are beginning to move away from a controller and a screen, and into the world of reality augmentation. Take the game Eye of Judgement for the PS3 for example. Using the PS Eye camera pointed at the game-board on the table the game reads cards that the player has laid out and then creates 3D monsters on the cards that actually battle as the game goes on. This creates the illusion that in fact you have these little monsters in front of you doing battle. Coming soon from Sony using the same technology is a game called EyePet, where again using the camera the user places a fiduciary marker and on screen comes alive a small cute furry pet that you can then play with as a “real” pet! Taking the idea of pets even further the game Invizimals for the PSP uses a camera for the PSP and surface colors and textures to display monsters around the player’s house and surroundings; meaning the users have to actually go outside and capture the animals using  fiduciary markers provided as traps! It’s a real life Pokemon hunt, and one amazing piece of technology.

With the onset of cheaper and more advanced Smartphones, GPS, HD cameras and smaller/more flexible circuits the ideas of Augmented Reality have just begun. For more information  on Augmented Reality head over to these few sites:

http://computer.howstuffworks.com/augmented-reality1.htm – A great starting article!

http://www.augmented-reality.org/ – An organization dedicated to all things reality augmentation

http://mashable.com/2009/08/27/yelp-augmented-reality/ -The 1st augmented reality iphone application

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augmented_reality – Of course another good place to learn.

- JN