Augmented Reality + Magic = ?

The magic is a fascinating show which can always bring us into mysterious imagination. However as introduced before, there is also an amazing technique which is able to produce the strong visual impact. Sure it is the Augmented Reality. So what could happen if merge these two stuffs? The next two videos can tell us:






The first video makes use of the markerless tracking tech. to determine the pose of an object, e.g. the card, and manipulate the animation based on the known pose. Certainly the guy who demonstrated the whole magic, is also a nice performer, however to take part in such a magic show the participant requires a HUD to observe the amazing animation.

In contrast, no extra hardwares are required for the participants. What you should do is just hold that board and enjoy the magic. But in my opinion the pose tracking of the board is realized by the inner coplanar markers, which means there must be an extra tracking instrument, e.g. an infrared camera, to determine the markers' pose. And if I didn't guess wrongly, the optimal performance time for this magic is night, which can guarantee the reflected light strength.

Anyway, they are two interesting magic Augmented Reality videos.

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Posted in: Augmented Reality,Videos,Virtual Reality

Parallel Tracking and Mapping for small AR Workspaces

Recently I read a paper about how to map the future points and determine the space coordinate system as well as track an object from university of Oxford. Actually since my thesis I have looked for the approaches estimating the pose and feature points-image points correspondence simutaneously. Some good candidates are like SoftPOSIT, RANSAC and Blind PnP. However during the practical implementation, I have found that the convergence ratio and run time are always the stumbling block for the practical applications, especially for the small number of feature points (between 4 to 11). Although this PTAM method requires large number of points, too, this is really an efficient and robust algorithm which could be applied in real time. Here let's have a look at a demo video and feel the power of this approach.



From this video I think most of us can have the intuitive experience of this PTAM approach. This method is mainly used for the hand-held camera pose estimation and it makes use of the dual-core computer to carry out the tracking and feature points mapping simutaneously. What surprises me more is that it requires no prior map before the tracking and a frame with 660 successful observations just used 18 ms. The implementation of this method for mapping and tracking respectively is certainly complecated, especially for the mapping. But if such an amazing application runs on your cellphone, it is still worth while. And here is another video of PTAM applications on IPhone.




And the paper of this approach is here.

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Posted in: Augmented Reality,Videos,Virtual Reality