Augmented Reality

Here's an unlikely recipe for successfully spicing up a winter clothes catalog – make the models lose their clothes, or to be more exact, allow your clients to see what is hiding underneath the bulky winter garments. The X-Ray augmented reality app by clothing retailer Moosejaw does exactly that. It uses your mobile device's camera and some augmented reality trickery to grant you X-ray vision, as you scan both female and male models' bodies in the catalog. All you have to do is position your device over the catalog pages. Read More

When Sony wanted to highlight the immersiveness of movies available on the Playstation Store, they turned to UK-based agencies Studio Output and Marshmallow Laser Feast to create a series of shorts around the theme "great films fill rooms." Using the Playstation Move, the production team shot a handful of scenes depicting an ordinary man going from his couch to flying above skyscrapers as a robot and fighting sea monsters. The best part: not a single aspect of these videos was added in the editing room. Read More

Fans of the original film in the Terminator franchise will recall how various bits of data were shown to be overlaid on the cyborg's vision - in particular, they might remember the list of possible responses that could be used when someone was angrily knocking on its door (for those who don't remember, its chosen response wasn't very polite). Such augmented vision systems are now a little closer to reality, thanks to work being done by a team of scientists at the University of Washington and Aalto University, in Finland. They have created a contact lens that displays information, which is visible to the wearer. Read More

Although many of us don't know how we ever managed without our car navigation systems, they are not without their flaws. For one thing, when that voice says "Turn left in 100 meters," you may find yourself looking out the windshield and wondering "Does that mean this left turn, or the one just past it?" The Wikitude Drive augmented reality navigation app is designed to address these problems, by overlaying directional arrows on real-time video of the road in front of you. Read More

Augmented reality (AR) seems to be touching almost every part of our lives at the moment. It's bringing arcade games to life, keeping back seat kids entertained during long journeys, offering on-the-spot translations and helping us to see the world in a different light. Now, Sony UK has developed an online tool that uses AR to help users visualize a new big screen TV in their home without needing to resort to a tape measure, or just leaving it to guess work and hoping for the best. Read More

Some people who spent their youth in the 80s miss that era, and wish that things now were like they were then. Well, those people might be interested in the University of California at Irvine’s OutRun Project. With the ultimate aim of developing gaming therapy systems for people such as quadriplegics, scientists involved in the project have created a kind of combination electric golf cart and arcade-style video game console. Players can actually drive the cart down the road, while an augmented reality feature displays the real-life road on the screen in front of them, but in the form of Sega’s classic 8-bit road racing game, OutRun. Read More

Facial recognition software, social networking and cloud computing ... they're all technological advances that alone have thrown up questions regarding privacy. According to a recent Carnegie Mellon University study, however, the three technologies can be combined to learn peoples' identities and other personal information about them, starting with just a photograph of their face. Read More

As a child sitting in the back of the family car, did you ever use your finger to doodle in the condensation on the inside of the windows? Well, a group of engineers and designers from Toyota Motor Europe’s Kansei1 Design Division and the consultancy arm of the Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design (CIID) have taken car-window-doodling into the 21st Century. They’ve created a prototype system that could turn the side windows of Toyotas into touchscreen augmented reality devices, allowing passengers to interface with the passing scenery. Read More

It can be very frustrating trying to fix something, when the person instructing you isn’t there in person, but is instead communicating with you over a phone line – “Whaddaya mean, ‘The silver cap’? Which silver cap?!” This is why engineers sometimes need to be flown in to factories or other places that use complex machines, to make repairs that simply can’t be explained verbally. Researchers from the Fraunhofer Institute for Communication, Information Processing and Ergonomics, however, have developed an augmented reality system that lets those engineers provide real-time visual instructions to distant on-site technicians ... and it can be done without internet access. Read More