A-B-C of Augmented Reality (II): vs. Virtual Reality

First of all, sorry. We were busy these days. We'd no time to update the blog.
We've to organize us in a better way. Now, let's continue talking about AR.

Some days ago we talked about the main idea that represents the augmented reality (AR) technology.

We all have heard about virtual reality and maybe some of you can't distinguish the difference between them. Well, here comes a simple explanation.

Virtual reality (VR) is a technology based in non-real images in a computer-generated environment. VR allows us to interact in a artificial world which replace the real world where we live. The keyword is replace. While AR adds new information to the real one, VR shows the user new information over the real one.

That VR could be generated through different devices such as googles, helmets, gloves or any type of special devices that captures the position and movement of the body, while it's moving in a virtual environment. We can see it in the next video.

Using googles and thanks to sensors, the character can move and interact in this kind of VR videogame. We see there's nothing from the real world visible in the environment.

Now, we can saw a similar videogame but using AR. In this image, we can see that gloves, helmets and others sensors are necessary to obtain the AR vision, but the result is different: the user can see the real world and interact with both the virtual and real images.

These images are from the ARQuake project, an AR project from the School of Computer and Information Science of the University of South Australia.

We'll talk about this special project in a few days. Since that, have fun and learn, learn!

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A-B-C of Augmented Reality (I)

Hi everyone!. We're back with a new entry. Today we're gonna talk about Augmented Reality, one of the main concepts of this project.

Basically, augmented reality is a real time union of the real images we can see at every moment, with other computer-generated. That's just a concept, but it gives us some hints about what we're talking about.

This technology adds information to the real world allowing the users a new type of interaction, in which the focus is not in one specific point, it's everywhere around the user. I mean, a 3D information.

To simplify it, think in someone with a sheet with an square drawn on it. Just like this from Tum' web (Thanks!):

Well, it's just a sheet, nothing special happens.

Ok, now, take a look to the next image with augmented reality.

Maybe you're thinking that it's just a drawing onto the first image. Well, look at this Quicktime video.

Not enough? Here we have a Youtube video showing us a similar test, but, this time with some advertising.

We hope you've learned something new about this interesting technology. We'll continue talking about it in the very next days.

See you!

Welcome to The ARLIM project!!!

Hi!

Welcome to The ARLIM project blog, where you can find information about the world of augmented reality and live information through mobile devices. That's our idea for this site but, also, it's a way to show all the people our progress with our university project.

To resume it, we'll develop an application that allows everyone, who has a mobile device with camera, to obtain live information and access to specified Internet WebPages while viewing the real world through their cameras. That information will be shown thanks to the augmented reality technology, which consists in combine virtual images and the real ones.

We'll upload this blog with more information about the world of augmented reality, mobile devices and other stuff related to our project. Sometimes in an expert way for programmers; other times easier as a gesture for those who are not familiar with code, IT and so on.

We know it's gonna be tough due to the complexity of the overall idea, but we'll try to give the best of ourselves to reach this aim.

We hope you can learn and have fun with us.

So, as I said before, welcome!