Hello.
Today I discovered a wonderfull project: Augmented reality.
If you want to learn more about it look here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augmented_reality

Is someone trying to develope something for maemo about Augmented reality?
Thanks
Bye

i suspect it will make more sense to try that with the next gen of tablets...

the current gen do not have the inputs or outputs to deal with the task...

hmm, i wonder if the next tablet will have a digital compass, as then one could combo the camera, gps and compass to create information overlays of what the camera is pointed at...

The next gen tablets should be more than capable platforms for AR projects with a high resolution camera and a plenty of juice under the hood for mangling the images and data.

It's not possible to just deduce the place and heading of the device accurately enough to apply images on the picture without analysing it, but location data could be used to gather data about items that are in the vicinity and use image recognition to spot them and draw additional layers over them.

There is great potential to augmented reality though... it would help a lot if someone managed to finally manufacture translucent head mounted displays that don't look dorky

You mean something better than this?
No, but seriously, I'd rather they worked on making them more affordable before they worry about making them less "dorky". My friends already say I look like a cyborg, so my wallet is more of a concern. I somehow didn't think of NITs when I was looking into augmented vision technologies, but the RX-51 could fit the bill. Hopefully some enterprising hackers will look into that when it's released.

Whoa! She's watched way too much Spaceballs.

I'm pretty sure that if they manage to make them look more consumer friendly (LESS DORKY) they can get the costs down as well because of the greater manufacturing volumes.

Still it would be nice to see some applications for a standalone tablet too.

Hehe perhaps this is a future job for me (well from the usability side and studying how humans use it [Psychology]). But I don't think the current tablets could handle such processing.

The heading is the only real problem, IMHO; there's a lot of AR stuff that (I think) should work fine with GPS-level accuracy. But I'm not sure we have enough horsepower in the RX-51 to be able to cope with head-turning in a non-laggy fashion -- that doesn't mean it can't be fun and even useful, though.

Also, there are other uses of AR not involving absolute positions of external objects -- a simple virtual crosshair overlay for an instrumented gun relies entirely on relative head/gun position, and is probably within the range of the RX-51's processing capabilities, too. (The gun could be a firearm, paintball marker, or even a duck-hunt controller whose only purpose is as input device, although the latter's not really AR.) Then too, with an appropriate camera, you can overlay other imagery (say, edge-detected near IR) on the actual FOV, without caring what objects are seen.

I'm more for cheap than non-dorky, too, but I see your point. I think there's still technical advances to be made, though, to get the price down where it ought to be. Once it can be manufactured cheap enough to sell to non-dorks, I'm sure some designer will make a non-dorky (but functionally crippled) version.