Living in an Augmented Reality

First, in the spirit of full disclosure, I will point out that one of the students in my lab built this demo.  So, I’m obviously biased.  

That said, I am pretty impressed with what she managed to pull off in a very short time.  Ignoring the work involved in hacking the iPhone to get video out of the camera, and porting a little 3D loader/rendering to the phone, she managed to work in quite a few of the ideas we’ve been batting around about how to take advantage of the iPhone for handheld AR;  a bunch of things are still not in there, but will be eventually.  

The idea motivating this project is the old “Virtual Pet”, with the goal of having an individual’s pet be available on different platforms (handheld 3D, handheld AR, desktop 3D, etc), and of having multiple people’s pets be able to play with each other.  More interestingly, we hope to have the environment’s in which you play with your pet affect their growth and behavior.  We’ll see how far we get!

Here’s a video of the current prototype.