Archive for the ‘research’ Category

Nefarious uses of Augmented Reality

Thursday, February 18th, 2010

real-time tracking of police presenceReal-time tracking of police presence would just require some friends

 

Recently I’ve been looking at the emerging humanitarian uses of collaborative micro-blogging, and in particular Project EPIC’s initiative to define a “folksonomy” of tweet formats to aid Haiti crisis response. I’m currently building a set of Yahoo Pipes feeds that process and locate relevant tweets onto an interactive map (I’ve been hampered by outages in Yahoo Pipes services). Yahoo Pipes is a sort of rudimentary visual programming, that will allow easy reconfiguration by non-programmers once these pipes have been set up. These tools are intended to be easily extendible and “mashable” into new uses.

I’ll post about the Yahoo Pipes work when it’s completed, but needless to say I am aware and involved in the positive potential of augmented reality and surrounding technologies.

I’ve been motivated to write about the negative potential after reading Augmented Planet’s “The Case Against Augmented Reality”. Although it gained some attention as a dissenting voice against the generally positive coverage AR gets, it was a little underwhelming, and even the comments failed (for me) to really go very deep into things. I’m effectively re-posting an annotated version of my comments on that page:
 
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360 camera setup

Friday, January 22nd, 2010

The video above is taken from Rubin’s Flash Panorama Laboratory. It is the result of experiments using non-professional commercial cameras to create “the world’s most affordable video solution capable of shooting and virtually recreating all possible viewing directions of the environment”. As you can see, the custom created video player allows you to move around the field of view, and zoom in and out. You can play with it on their site.

It would be interesting to explore the sense of immersion that could be produced by tying this into a head mounted (or even just more directly mouse controlled) interface, with the possibility of recreating recorded first-person experiences a la Johnny Mnemonic.

Building Point-Clouds of Emotions

Friday, January 22nd, 2010

Following on from my look at image-based reconstruction of the buildings of a city, I want to explore another type of reconstruction; let’s call it psycho-social. While the image-reconstructions build a cloud of architectural feature points, location-tagged micro-blogging allows the formation of a cloud of social/emotional “enunciation points”.

With the announcement that Twitter will be building in support for latitude/longitude tagging, we are guaranteed a steady flood of points to build our Psycho-Social City.

The following is an example of what is being done with Twitter at the moment, without fine-grain location information:

 

 
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How to Build Cities from Tourist Photos

Tuesday, January 19th, 2010

My research colleague Vinh Nguyen sent me this video of Washington University’s latest image-based reconstruction project (via a New Scientist article “Entire cities recreated from Flickr photos”).

 

 

The video shows reconstructed mesh models of the city of Rome. The meshes were constructed using “Structure from Motion“, a “process of finding the three-dimensional structure by analyzing the motion of an object over time”. In this case, the motion is actually the motion of tourists around the city, capturing the same buildings from many different angles. The power of such an approach is that thousands of creative-commons images of a particular city can be retrieved with a quick flickr search.
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Virtual Cycling in Real Places

Wednesday, December 16th, 2009

via Hackaday:

bike-vr-rig

Two bike trainer projects; one connected to Google Street View, and the other capable of a number of different visualizations (including Google Earth and Second Life).

In their use of Google Street View and Google Earth, they demonstrate the collection of freely available location information out there. The 1:1 relationship between the bike “movement” and movement through a VR space is also interesting to explore.