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Google Earth + Atlantis Space Shuttle

Parag K Mital — Sun, 10 Jul 2011 00:21:08 +0000

I managed to catch the live feed from NASA.gov of the Atlantis Space Shuttle launch yesterday. Though what I found really interesting was a real-time virtual reality of the space shuttle launch from inside Google Earth. Screen-capture with obligatory 12x speedup to retain attention span below:

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Memory, Kinetica Art Fair, & SketchUp

Parag K Mital — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 20:12:00 +0000

As part of the Kinetica Art Fair 2010, Memory is required to fill in a risk assessment form. This entails listing out all the possibly tragic events that can occur, how many people could potentially die, and a design of the installation as seen from top-down and the side. Having only seen pictures of the space before, deciding on the design was a bit tricky (let alone figuring out how many people would die). The piece itself is not very modular and has to make use of the space (take a look at what I mean). It is basically a web that latches onto whatever it can find in the space. As such, we really needed a nice model of the space in order to model the installation.

I went through an attempt of photoshopping the few pictures with some ridiculous looking lines. It didn’t seem to capture the space. Next attempt was with Illustrator. Hmm. Nope not much further. Maybe just draw the thing? Nope. I couldn’t seem to get the scale right or even think about how to lay out the design in a space I wasn’t really sure about. I just couldn’t visualize the … Continue reading...

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Augmented Reality Trend

Parag K Mital — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 16:32:00 +0000

via Google Trends… Continue reading...

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Tagging Your World

Parag K Mital — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 12:54:00 +0000

Though AR has been around for awhile (ACM Special Issue in 1993 though dedicated conferences beginning in 1997), it seems to be at a point where it is finally hitting the mainstream. A number of development libraries have been around for awhile (ARToolkit, FlARToolkit, ARTAG, D’Fusion @Home, Mixed Reality Toolkit (MRT), Unifeye Viewer Xtra, Mirage Builder, and Studierstube Tracker). Though with the advent of the iPhone App Market and the Google Android Market Place, we are finally starting to see some practical applications that seem to be a head start towards a meta-tagged world. I’ll continually add more here and try to group them as I see fit. But the basic premise of these applications allows users to create a digital layer over the physical one. I think the SixthSense video demo shows this concept brilliantly (though most of the demo is more concept than reality).

Using the camera to detect features in a scene:

(1) Google Goggles

(2) SixthSense (the demo is more concept than reality)

(3) SREngine
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Augmented Reality Browsers (see a comparison of a few here):

(1) Layar

(2) WWSignpost

(3) Wikitude (though this seems … Continue reading...

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