Slashdot Mirror
Virtual Reality Book Overlays
fiannaFailMan writes "The Magic Book is a technology that allows a user to look through a handheld viewer with a built-in camera and see 3-dimensional models as if they float above the book. The software is clever enough to keep track of where the page is, so if you move the book, the model moves with it. One application is displaying content telling the story of the America's Cup. You can download the application and use your own webcam to view this, minus the 3D effect of course."
Could have many practical applications for those who are a bit crap at following DIY instructions...
Due to lack of disk space this user has been discontinued
for blind people?
seemed interesting till I saw that the software was windows only, and that I don't have a webcam, and I can't read....damn
Monstar L
Advance the pattern recognition a bit then
Imagine the applications for this with household objects, items at a museum, body parts, mechanical components.
Build it into eyeglasses and have an informative heads up display.
I don't think anyone commenting truly understands the possibilities that will be available when 3 dimensional screens (will they be called screens??) become our everyday monitors.
Right now, for example, we represent 3 dimensional shapes in a 2 dimensional manner. A cube is represented as three rhomboids in a plane. This gives us a representation of what a 3D object would look like in 2D. So far this has worked out great, primarily because except for actually building a 3D model, we are limited to drawing cubes in 2 dimensions.
Having a third dimension will make the representation of length, width, height a piece of cake. However, the real benefit will be the possibility to draw 4-dimensional shapes like hyperspheres and hypercubes in 3 dimensions. Whereas 2D screens limited us to representing 3D objects, a 3D screen will allow us to represent 4D objects.
With physics rapidly moving towards multi-dimensional theories about our universe, it makes sense that we start using screens that can help us visualize what those higher dimensions look like, even if our own minds are unable to grasp the true natures of those shapes.
Dancin Santa
wake me up when larry (as in flynt) is using it..
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
I was interested myself until I saw the device shaped like opera glasses you need to hold up :-)
Because children's books have enjoyed most of these book-related innovations, it's easy to overlook the evolution of "book technology" and the ways in which we're bridging the gap between digital media and the printed page.
Nevertheless, BlackMagic still looks like a View-Master, which will prevent some people from seeing it as a serious innovation. I wonder what it will take for this or (more likely) a different technology to be accepted eventually as a hardware standard by textbook publishers, fine art books, etc.
To put this into a broader context, we've already seen numerous proprietary technologies for making children's books interactive; we also have companion CD-ROMs, online rich media supplements, audiobook alternatives for an increasing number of titles, books bundled with audio recordings, and telephone book reading services offered by libraries. Most of these technologies "liberate" the text by adding sound, while only the multimedia supplements liberate illustrations. Therefore I appreciate BlackMagic's achievement, which, like LeapFrog's LeapPad, localizes the enhancements--as opposed to the CD-ROM (et al) that are inherently detached from the book itself.
...It's called a "pop-up book."
Seriously, this seems to be a pretty trivial, and almost useless, implementation of the ARToolkit. If you're going to have to wear goggles anyway to view part of the material, why not just put the whole book in memory and display it that way without having to go through the complicated and clunky "augmented-reality" step?
One application is displaying content telling the story of the America's Cup.
Wow. DULL.
Haven't seen anyone say this yet, but this is one of many projects based on the GPL ARToolKit. A friend of mine has another project here.
Looks like A Diamond Age isn't far away...
ZZ
porn?
If you need a special viewer to see the 3d models, why have a physical book there at all?
You don't even need to improve the pattern recognition.
I've seen other applications of this kind of technology: they just use a big obvious target the camera can track. You can put them on the wall, on a table, wave them around, the 3d projection follows the target. Put coded targets around the museum displays so the software can see where to project the image, and it'd just work.
So your "book" could be reduced to a card with the target on, and an interface to turn the pages. A tagged thimble the camera could track and you could tap on virtual buttons with would be enough. Putting it in a physical book is just marketing. Probably necessary, at this point, but it seems way too limiting to me.
looks like he wishes he could be looking at something else...
I don't think anyone commenting truly understands the possibilities that will be available when 3 dimensional screens
To say nothing of the physiological impact. In the human eye, rods outnumber cones by a huge margin; but we rely more on cones when focusing on bright 2D surfaces, like a computer screen. Therefore, some physicians believe that prolonged and repeated computer work disadvantages the eye over time because of the underutilization of rod cells. I can't confirm that specific theory, but I certainly believe that our eyes will find some relief in holographic displays.
Yet another underwhelming use of VR goggle technology. I can remember when I was working in TV this stuff, along with *cough* interactive video *cough* was going to take over the world. Along with that Philips CD-i player.
VR goggles have their uses but they are mostly for applications where you are already wearing goggles. Me and my snow buddies have been speculating for ages about a pair of VR ski goggles that would use sonar or radar to overlay a contour map of the hill when you were flying down in low contrast conditions... handy for avoiding the death cookies.
I'm not wrong. You haven't thought about it hard enough.
This makes a nice demo of augmented reality. But it is and remains pretty much useless until the price of VR glasses drops dramatically, their quality increases greatly, and an application like this has a significant benefit compared to just lookint at an image on-screen or on a Tablet PC.
RTF3DM
While it's most common to do this with ARToolKit, as other posters have mentioned, that shouldn't discourage you from doing the whole thing yourself. It's buckets of fun, I promise.
This is a big piece of _nothing_. The ehh "technology" is about recognising white squares in the book, and overlaying 3d images at the blanks. The article did not mention, but I guess the 3d info is on the cupplied CD. So the only piece of innovation I see here is using a white square in a book as a 3d input device. Why would i want to use their book as an input device for the 3d video as a background? Why don't they put the backgroud ont he CD also, and voila, no need for a book. Any sheet of blank paper will do. vajk
--<Mike>--
This seems like a cheap head tracking device. Rather than have an eye on the monitor try to determine what the person is looking at, it puts the eye on the glasses. Then it reads the geometry of the squares on the piece of paper to determine perspective from the viewer's eyes. I don't know why it's in a book format. It seems difficult to use. Take off glasses glasses, read book, turn page, put on glasses, watch animation, repeat. It would be better to have the squares on more of a platform. Then you have to story told sort of like Star Wars and the hologram R2D2 thing. Just move around the platform to watch the object/animation from different perspectives. This seems like a cheap way to allow multiple people (as many as can cram around the platform) to watch the 3d show.
I can appreciate the underlying technology of pattern recognition and virtual reality, and I can understand the allure of dabbling with it, but this combination doesn't make any practical sense. Why bother with a book?
I can recall those Sony Vaio computers with built-in cameras that came out years ago included software that allowed you to use the camera in a way similar to a barcode reader. It could recognise matrix type 2d code that looked like pixelated squares.
The technology used for this BlackMagic book is similar to that. I can see how it can be useful for integrating a video feed with data acquisition, for example recognising inventory from a security camera video. And I can also see how it can be used for optical motion tracking for CGI and virtual reality. But the combination in this story just doesn't seem useful.
[SPROING!]
Puzzles/toys/games where you see the assembly instructions as you hold up pieces.
The puzzles would ship with a software disc that had a piece database for recognition purposes.
Make the puzzles using one of those 3D "printers" and you are in for hours of fun, with assistance (when you want) it, and you end up with a physical 3D object at the end.
I could see this technolgy taking off when
we see Wi-Fi taking off in smaller devices.
* Let's say your skiing and these b/w
symbols are on the signs and "current" trail,
weather, hazard information pops up. It's not
cost effective to have the signs electronic
(not to mention theft), but a Wi-Fi Goggles
with real-time info would be helpful.
Or with GPS...
* Let's say you're skiing and you've lost your
kid who is equipped with a GPS unit, and these
b/w symbols are on the signs and pop up 3D
arrows to the kid's location.
The symbols are just static tags in this case,
providing cheap location markers and a content
index for the expensive unit on your head.
Markus Diersbock
I love seeing old ideas getting recycled. old school version
Authority questions you. Return the favor.
What's sad about this is that as far as the New Zealand IT industry is concerned, HitLab are the *darlings* of leading edge research.
Nobody, and I do mean nobody, has the first idea that HitLab didn't invent the AR toolkit. Nobody in any of the government funding agencies has ever downloaded the source and seen copyrights from Japanese university researchers all over it. And HitLab get MILLIONS OF DOLLARS FUNDING for doing this.
I like Mark (Billinghurst, in the picture) and he *is* a very clever guy. But the whole funding basis of HitLab is built on cleverly side stepping a number of questions that nobody is smart enough to ask. It only pisses me off because I know there are projects out there that don't get funding because shit like this kicks off all over the place.
Dave >:(
I write a blog now, you should be afraid.