technology : Inverse Augmented reality
 

Hi,

I seem to have managed to pull something off and I think its uber cool.

Many people know I have strong desire to operate a cluster of maemo tablets together operating as one.
I took a massive step towards that goal yesterday by overcoming one of the most challenging technical issues with such a thing.

I needed to be able to detect the location of my devices with reasonable accuracy and reproducibility.

People who have seen this think its magic and made of witchcraft, what do you think?
http://i4.ytimg.com/vi/sjSrwpbxyAM/default.jpg
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sjSrwpbxyAM

Re: technology : Inverse Augmented reality
 

way cool, I remember discussing the position-detection stuff with you and abbra at the summit, can you eloborate how you actually did it?

Re: technology : Inverse Augmented reality
 

people have been trying to work that one out since I posted it.
realistically though, its either witchcraft or I am using one of the cameras ;)

at about 11 seconds in, you see the reflection of the orientation lights that are needed, I plan for home use to have a small LED lamp attached to side of my monitor, and for larger tests it can simply be a larger version hung above.

it actually knows about scale and rotation too and can be combined with http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Z51-vCa0_Q to allow even more nice things to occur.

I keep mixing up my n900 with my desktop mouse ;)

Re: technology : Inverse Augmented reality
 

That is way cool. Did you use accelerometer? Is horizontal rotation of the unit an issue?

I thought that this kind of tracking combined with the front camera would make a cool scanner/copy machine. Just turn over and wave across a page (or swipe in circles) and fill in corresponding parts of a large image.

Re: technology : Inverse Augmented reality
 

explain more plz. this really is way too cool

Re: technology : Inverse Augmented reality
 

"inverse augmented reality"??? so... reduced reality? i thought thats what drugs were for? :)

Re: technology : Inverse Augmented reality
 

That is awesome! An interesting use of the front facing camera.... I'm still wondering about the practical application though :D (due to restriction of angles and setup needed)

Re: technology : Inverse Augmented reality
 

well off the top of my head, there is desktop mouse, 3 cups game, liqflow massive, multiple window application surfaces, drawing games, kids "reveal the picture" games, tracing fake paths (toy cars around a track;))

just think of it like old style games where the play window was smaller than the real surface :)

most of all, its just something I wanted to have a go at since I realised it would work after taking this photo:

http://liqbase.net/liqbase_double_tiny.JPG

Re: technology : Inverse Augmented reality
 

Nice!

What is the minimum # of light spots required? Do you have to pack a string of christmas-tree LED arrangement for it? :D

This would be awesome for interactive display in museums and such. For commercial applications, I guess you can tie the content with the light configuration too....

Hmmm possibilities... possibilities... :D

Re: technology : Inverse Augmented reality
 

I also recall a cluster of us discussing this excitedly outside that night club during Maemo Summit 2009, how useful proximity detection could be. I knew if anyone could crack it that it would be you lcuk!

Re: technology : Inverse Augmented reality
 

currently, it looks for 3 brightest lightspots coming in from the camera with a close ratio on the distance between them (2:2:1)

from these, I can guestimate distance rotation and position.

The video I uploaded is using a picture shown on another n900 to supply the spots (another app would be high 5 ;))

currently there is no barcode style information in the detection routine but it has crossed my mind to allow numeric identifiers to be stored within there (using a sierpinski layout)


http://liqbase.net/n900_lightdots_50_3.png

this is the camera view showing detected elements

http://liqbase.net/liq.20100713_2318...m_run1.scr.png

Re: technology : Inverse Augmented reality
 

never left my head :)
I have had some crazy ideas about how to pull this off, but it seemed the simplest and most reproducible, even though it needs extra hardware.

Re: technology : Inverse Augmented reality
 

I just uploaded another video to youtube showing the liqmouse concept
it is not a working prototype and is just visualisation of the idea

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cdVqdfFdL3Q