26th
Ad-hoc AR Interfaces
My last post failed to credit Johnny Chung Lee, who had the idea to use an LED light pen + wii remote to create interactive white-boards, as in this video.
The cool thing about the light-pen is that you could do this just as easily with an augmented reality platform as with a projector. If you’ve got localization running and some flat surface on which to write, you could overlay the interface over that area. Tape a Wii remote and a web-cam together, and you can use the light pen to interact with it.
Of course, if the surface really is flat, there may not be enough feature points available to use SLAM, which is a shame since I really like to avoid using fiducial markers. But in this case, you could use a combination; use SLAM while walking around, and if you find a flat surface, slap a temporary fiducial marker on it and let the system localize the marker with respect to the feature points. Then you could leave the interface and take your marker with you, and come back at some later time and have the data still be in the same relative location.
There are a couple directions you could take a platform like this. Graffiti is definitely the most exciting to me. Digital graffiti isn’t as static as paint; you could ‘tag’ the virtual surfaces with text, video, audio, even interactive apps. I mean, I’ve seen plenty of code snippets written on bathroom walls around here, but it would be much cooler if they could actually run.
Another idea: you wouldn’t necessarily even need SLAM or a surface to access an HMD-based interface. As long as the wii camera is properly calibrated with respect to the display, you could use the light-pen to mouse a ‘floating’ overlay interface. Or, adding SLAM, you could localize the display in 3D space instead of POV-space.
Which reminds me… anybody know when these are coming out?
