
Disney Research unveils augmented reality books - dccoolgai
http://www.disneyresearch.com/project/hideout/
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ioquatix
This implementation looks amazing but also seems practically very awkward.. I
can't imagine children being so patient and accurate like in the video!

We've been doing things like this for years at the HITLabNZ. Check out our
latest project, which is free this week!
[http://colarapp.com](http://colarapp.com)

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jevinskie
Wow, the demo video is really remarkable! I will try it out with the office
iPad tomorrow. Really great job! The video speaks a thousand words even
without any spoken words. =) How do you align the coloring book pages from the
camera feed? Do you detect the corners of the printer paper or is there some
printed, hidden marker on the page?

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GrantS
I'm not involved with the app, but there's no need for a hidden marker in this
case -- the page IS the marker. It is a planar surface with one of a few known
black and white images on it. So: Detect features in each blank drawing, store
them in a database included in the app, then use the same corner detector and
descriptor at runtime and you have a very constrained feature matching
problem.

If you're not familiar with feature detection methods, SIFT is a famous one,
though there are much faster methods existing today:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scale-
invariant_feature_transfo...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scale-
invariant_feature_transform)

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ioquatix
We use Vuforia and Unity. Adrian Clark did his PhD thesis on tracking and we
based our app on his ideas and work. We don't use SIFT as it is patented but
we have better research in the pipeline.

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GuiA
If you find this stuff interesting, check out TEI, the conference at which
this was published:

[http://www.tei-conf.org](http://www.tei-conf.org)

It's an amazing conference that has been going on since 2007- great people,
much smaller than CHI (of course its scope is much narrower, and there is a
lot of cross-pollination), very high quality and diverse publications. Even
though it's an academic conference, it has more of a hacker/DIY feel to it
than CHI in my opinion, which is what I love about it.

Speaking of which, the deadline for TEI2014 is Aug 1st... back to writing I go
:)

(and if you're into this, please contact me through my profile!
Tangible/embodied interaction is a small world, would love to hear from fellow
HNers who are in it)

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evan_
This looks pretty similar to Jeri Ellsworth's CastAR project, except not head-
mounted.

[http://makezine.com/2013/05/19/jeri-ellsworth-unveils-
augmen...](http://makezine.com/2013/05/19/jeri-ellsworth-unveils-augmented-
reality-castar-at-maker-faire/)

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sabalaba
Making the markers visible in the infrared spectrum is genius.

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Schwolop
For books and many other print media however, it's just overkill. You can do
it markerless just by tracking known content on the page.

It's great for tracking within the whitespace however - that's where it's a
cunning solution!

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seiji
Still waiting for proper 'ractives.

an iPad could do it now, but we don't have the proper capture/reprocessing
frameworks in place (outside of research).

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eblume
I was just thinking how close we must be to "A Young Lady's Illustrated
Primer" (see: "Diamond Age", by Neal Stephenson, referenced by me and seiji
here. GREAT book.)

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lifeisstillgood
But do we know enough to tell software how to raise a child?

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seiji
There were two versions of primers. The mass market version had auto-schooling
(giant boat of threatening asian girls). The expensive ("for royalty/CEOs")
version had a live adult person interacting with the child, but the child
didn't know a real person was behind it. The child just thought the book was
very good at being instructive. The actor of the expensive primer had no way
to communicate with the child except through Primer-Approved stories, but the
actor would direct and personalize the stories as necessary for the child's
life conditions (i.e. "remote parenting").

~~~
lifeisstillgood
Yes, I forgot. Her "other mother" \- thank you. Including the cool escape from
abusive home section.

What a great book.

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joelhaus
Did Lucas ever license the rights to anyone for the futuristic chess game on
the millennium falcon? Seems like an obvious application of this tech,
particularly now that Disney owns the franchise.

~~~
lifeisstillgood
I think we can see the next mobile hardware killer app.

I mean the number of cool "what if you did this" reminds me of early days of
GPS and indeed GPS in phones

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dgallagher
This is similar to some of the AR games on Nintendo 3DS, with the exception
that you don't need to look through a screen to get the effect. You can
imagine this on Google Glass too, viewable only by those wearing the HUD.

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malandrew
They ought to head mount that thing so it follows wherever you are looking.

