For my PhD I had loads of fun with tangible augmented reality interfaces. I posted a couple of videos on my work onto Google Video a few weeks back, which shows the kinds of things I ended up doing:
This work was done using the ARToolKit, an augmented reality toolkit that does the computer vision tracking of the marker cards you can see in the video.
I’m very tempted to build something based on this for Hack day!
In collaboration with a couple of guys from the research lab I work at, we recently had the crazy idea to make the ARToolkit into a web service.
The basic idea is as follows: you take a photo of an ARToolKit marker in a fun place, upload it to the web service and it renders some 3D content over the card using the ARToolKit.
I started putting together a basic web app using the Ruby Camping framework. I even managed to get it to upload result to Flickr if the user decided they liked the resulting image.
The app still needs a lot of work (e.g. letting people choose which 3D model they want rendered), but the basics are there for a nice hack.
What we really need to do is work out an actual application/scenario for this - there probably isn’t one and it’s just a bit of fun, pointless hackery. But I’m quite intrigued to investigate some kind of whacky “physical meets the digital” experiment…
On Saturday I presented a guest lecture for a masters course on Medical Informatics at the Universidade do Porto, Portugal.
The title of the lecture was: “The Semantic Web: a Medical Perspective”.
I described the issues surrounding the sharing of data in the medical domain, and how the current web fails to address the needs of users wishing to integrate different data sets. I then introduced the semantic web, but I did it from the perspective of linking data rather than the top-down, formal ontologies and logic route.
Although presenting a full lecture was a new experience for me, I think it went well. I gave the presentation in English rather than try a mixture of rusty Portuguese/English, although looking back now perhaps I should have gone with the Portuguese. It’s so easy to drop in a typical English expressions or word that non-native English speakers won’t have a clue about!
I’ve made the slides for the presentation available here: slides (PDF, 7Mb).
From what I understand, they mounted the camera to the car’s dashboard and then my grandmother had to press the camera shutter every eight seconds or so. It’s amazing to see the old cars and trucks on the road, and then right at the end there’s a brand new Mini!
It’s also fun to see how little time they spend behind other cars - as soon as one comes up they’ve overtaken it!
