Digital Pictures augmenting your reality with Papervision
Oh! What a time to have a busted web cam and a printer packed firmly away: while we wait patiently to see just how lovable Sony's curiously Monchichi-esque EyePet will be, Digital Pictures Interactive have released the first stirrings of their own bespoke version which you can interact with now by printing a reference spot and training your webcam to your desk.
The studio is the same one behind their earlier Save Your Sensible campaign that also uses Papervision3D tech to do realtime 3D animation in Flash, utilizing, they say, "a file format originally created for first person shooter video games from 10 years ago (id Software's Quake 2)."
The games potential for this type of augmented reality is obviously quite high, and while Sony is one of the few big players currently dabbling in it (also with their card RPG Eye of Judgment), we also have big hopes for Nintendo to do the same with the now camera-enabled DSi.
Let us know how you get on with your creature via the comments.
Papervision - Augmented Reality [Digital Pictures Interactive]
macisaguy
10:40 AM November 20, 2008 – #1
The Furbie/Tamagotchi aspect isn't nearly as entertaining as the idea of just having one displayed on a 24 webcam somewhere.
Which, now that I type that...doesn't really seem all that interesting either really. Still, this makes me want a webcam more than I've ever wanted one in the past.
VICTOR JIMENEZ
12:27 PM November 20, 2008 – #2
Cool! AugReality brings us a new potential of cool toys-games and surely lots of advertisement.
Now we just need to wear some kind of glasses to comfortably see it on the street or home without any cameras, like in that anime, Dennou Coil.
PoisonedV
2:31 PM November 20, 2008 – #3
I've never experimented with this stuff before, so it was really cool for me. Cannot wait to see where this goes.
Ben Johnson
3:08 PM November 20, 2008 – #4
I did some experimental game making with this kind of technology back in grad school in 2003. It looks like they still have our old project site up in the archives. Unfortunately, I don't think our old presentation video is still around.
As much as I love AR tech, it takes more than slowly rotating a camera around a model to impress me. The only difference between what we were doing in 2003 and what you see in this video is the general improvement in graphics rendering capability that we've seen across the board in the last 5 years.
Show me gameplay!
Brandon Boyer
3:53 PM November 20, 2008 – #5
Ben: and the fact that it's running in-browser via a ubiquitous plugin, surely! The concept and recognition tech is old, for sure (even Gizmondo had famously promised a handheld version), but the fact that any schmo with a printer and a MacBook can do this from their office desk seems noteworthy, at least.
Ben Johnson
1:08 PM November 24, 2008 – #6
Ah, yup. That's swell.
Still, I think AR entertainment is suffering more from a lack of a compelling can't-get-it-any-other-way experience. But the more approachable the tech is, the more likely somebody will experiment enough to find it.