ARQuake project

Some days ago we talked about the difference between augmented and virtual reality showing images of a special shoot 'em up.

These images are from the ARQuake project, an AR project from the School of Computer and Information Science of the University of South Australia. It was the very first attempt to create a videogame for real world. Here are one of the videos they made and the links to the others.

More videos:
http://es.youtube.com/watch?v=n781KHm230s
http://es.youtube.com/watch?v=MDYv_uLmkE
http://es.youtube.com/watch?v=Qb5rACCUC1g

A good question would be... ¿Can I play? :)
mmmm, don't think so... because of its difficulty and cost. We need a head mounted display, a laptop, a head tracker, and, obviously, a GPS system to obtain our position. We can see in the first image that we're facing to a complex system. So, we've to continue waiting for news from them.

I wanna play ARQuake, and you?

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!

Send this entry to Meneame, Digg.

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!