Tuesday, March 29, 2016

This App Brings Personalized Augmented Reality Fashion to Your Phone

http://thecreatorsproject.vice.com/blog/normals-apparel-augmented-reality-app

This App Brings Personalized Augmented Reality Fashion to Your Phone

All images courtesy of Normals 
Here's working proof that one day you'll be able to wear your digital avatar to the club. Design studio Normals has created an experimental iOS app that recognizes a custom shirt and adds augmented reality accessories. When viewed through your device, a series of geometric shapes move in real time, floating and shifting around the boxy black shirt. Called Apparel, the app is tied to data from your Twitter account and the virtual designs vary depending on your feed.
The project is tied up in a world they call Trudent, a fictional place where aimless residents bicker over trivial affairs, mainly fashion. There's a video series about it, a short story, and it's even got a soundtrack you can download from Bandcamp. The plot of Trudent is a pretty scathing indictment of the fashion world, with Zoolander-type characters having runway battles, and mindless fans caught up in a social media frenzy over it all. But the app itself aims to display a user's true identity by drawing from your personality on Twitter.
"If you use many exclamation marks, or if you're generally being authoritative, your piece's shoulders will inflate as the 'Authoritopathy' mod will accumulate that data," they tell us. "If you tweet cute things, the 'Kawaiiopathy' mod will go up and your piece will start displaying all sorts of symbols and animal heads. If you talk too much about yourself, the overall mesh of your model will take an imprint of your profile pic, and blow up in all directions using this pic as a displacement map." You can make the mods evolve in real time and watch them change as you Tweet.
There's also three immediate moods you can project, which are activated through emojis on the app, including sad, scared, and angry. While holding the sad emoji, tears spill off the shirt like rain, and the anger emoji reacts to your voice, so you can scream at your phone while holding it.
The current model has 10 mods based off data from your feed, but they're working to expand that number and also integrate it with other social media platforms beyond Twitter. It took about a year and a half of on-and-off development, and the source code, built on OpenFrameworks, is published hereJulien Gachadoat was the lead developer. They hope to release an Android version as well, although that would take a rewriting of code from scratch. This is a follow up to their original augmented reality app for Google Glass from a couple years back.
As much as this project brings reality to the level of science fiction, Normals giddily works to blur the line between fact and fiction in other ways. When asked where they're from, they respond, "Somewhere in the future, although we have a cell in Paris for present-related matters." Who wrote the soundtrack? Well, the first two songs were "auto-soundtracks generated" for the characters from the short story, and the second two are culled from "ambient sound in the Trudent (811;327;142) locale."
If you're in present day New York, you can play with the app in person at Coded_Coutre, a technology and fashion exhibit at the Pratt Manhattan Gallery until April 30th. Otherwise, you can test out your Twitter persona on the project's website with their virtual garment.
To learn more about Normals, click here
Related:

AR Navigation Monday April 4th- red lecture hall ---plz come!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!


required watching



http://www.fastcompany.com/3057642/the-recommender/creative-control-is-a-look-into-your-creepy-augmented-reality-future

Wednesday, March 16, 2016

Be Ready to present your Final Idea for Next Class!

All Grad Students will present their Final Project Ideas Friday!!!!!
Have a 5 min Power Point ready covering the point mentioned in the previous blog post-

Come prepared-
Please meet with me [Mark] outside of class.
Tuesday and Thursday are the best days-

Mark

Saturday, March 12, 2016

Using the HoloLens emulator

Using the HoloLens emulator The download is coming soon. The HoloLens Emulator will be available on March 30th. The HoloLens emulator allows you to test holographic apps on your PC without a physical HoloLens and comes with the HoloLens development toolset. The emulator uses a Hyper-V virtual machine. The human and environmental inputs that would usually be read by the sensors on the HoloLens are instead simulated using your keyboard, mouse, or Xbox controller. Apps don't need to be modified to run on the emulator and don't know that they aren't running on a real HoloLens.

https://dev.windows.com/en-US/holographic/using_the_hololens_emulator

next gen glasses- look for the sceen capture shots- pretty amazing

Make your own HoloLens AR display for under £20 | Polylens

http://www.sabbakeynejad.co.uk/#/photos/3


Thursday, March 10, 2016

Final Project Research!

Final Project Research!

So its time to start getting your ideas together for your final project-
I want you to create a google doc and share it with me + post the info on the blog.

I want:

1. Competitive analysis. Who is your augmented reality competition? What AR projects are similar to your idea? GOOGLE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!  You have to know this...
i.e. If you are doing medical look at every medical AR app out there- find the ones you think are the best and very worst. Post them all to ur the doc.

2. Real world examples. ie. medical focused on cancer.... watch different cancer surgeries in real life. Find a situation where u think you can make it better or safer or easier etc. find the most comon problems facing those dealing with the surgery. What goes wrong most often? Whats the hardest part? What takes the most practice? After you find this area focus on it.

3. Talk to people who are on the front line. ie. medical.
       A. Talk to doctors in the field who deal with your target problem. If you cant talk to the doctor                 find medical journals where they have written on the subject.
       B. Talk to the patients who go thru the surgery. What is hardest for them? what is the scariest                   part? What could make them feel better, recover faster, etc?

4. Your user's experience with your project under ideal circumstances. IE. the person takes out the phone- they load your app. then what? I want step by step breakdown of the user's experience.

5. The idea outcome of your project. If everything worked the way you wanted it to what would happen? Talk about the affected people...

6. Google image search- Mood board-  Find supporting images that help explain your idea...

7. Research AR tech that could be applied to your project. You can look at other projects in which the tech could be applied to your project. Look at who's doing it right. Who has the coolest work?

8. Storyboards [optional]

Storytelling

It's Final Project Time
A number of people are doing projects which have a narrative. 

I cannot begin to stress how important your storytelling ability is SO important!!!! Even if its abstract... the over all flow should equal something in the end.
Here is some info on storytelling. Please go out and explore the net for more resources and post if you find anything great. Basically everyone is doing great work- keep it up.


Friday, March 4, 2016

vuforia demo

https://www.dropbox.com/s/p5um7pl9z1j5jnb/VuforiaDemo.zip?dl=0

Wednesday, March 2, 2016

Barriers To Augmented Reality Are Holding Us Back From The Holodeck

http://arxiv.org/pdf/1512.05471v1.pdf


Barriers To Augmented Reality Are Holding Us Back From The Holodeck

Next Story

Meet Brain, The AI Engine That Wants To Replace Search

There is more money and talent invested in virtual and augmented reality than ever before. Indeed, more than $3.5 billion has been invested into virtual and augmented reality startups in the past two years. The industry is growing fast; Goldman Sachs suggests the combined hardware and software market for VR and AR will reach, on a base case, $80 billion by 2025, with a potential to reach more than $180 billion.
Many experts believe that in the long run, augmented reality will represent the larger opportunity, as the ability to introduce all manner of information and experience into the natural environment transforms markets, and indeed the nature of our existence.
Companies such as Magic Leap are attracting enormous investment on such promise. But from a technical perspective, augmented reality is considered more difficult, as creating responsive media in the real environment is full of technical challenges.
Recently, seven scientists from universities with leading research programs in virtual and augmented reality published the proceedings of discussions related to the technical challenges in realizing the AR opportunity.
Beyond the technical challenges to achieving true augmented reality, the researchers pause to consider ethics.
Co-authored by Christian Sandor, Martin Fuchs, Alvaro Cassinelli, Hao Li, Richard Newcombe, Goshiro Yamamoto and Steven Feiner, Breaking the Barriers to True Augmented Realityconsiders the main approaches to realizing augmented reality, as well as the technical and ethical challenges, in order to draw conclusions on what direction future development of AR might take.
First, the researchers consider the four main approaches to achieving true augmented reality, which can be represented on a scale of “decreasing order of physicality” from “manipulating atoms” to “manipulating perception.” These four approaches include:
Controlled matter: Arguably the most technically challenging approach would be to manipulate or reconfigure atoms in order to change the physical environment. Think Star Trek Holodeck. While this may seem outlandish today, there is research in this direction. The researchers point to “displays that use magnetic fields to rapidly create shapes out of ferromagnetic fluid,” and another class of displays that “levitate solid objects in a field of overlaid ultrasonic or magnetic waves.” The challenges to realizing this approach include safety and energy requirements.
Surround AR: The “next best thing to manipulating atoms is manipulating photons,” in order to make objects in the environment visually indistinguishable from physical reality. The researchers imagine environments replete with light-field displays that create very realistic visual effects. Haptics might be achieved by “stimulating the user’s skin through ultrasound waves.” The challenges to this approach include the immensity of the data processing required and the ability to achieve high resolution. Thus, technology for plenoptic displays remains “in its infancy,” even while light-field sensors have advanced.
Personalized AR: This approach revolves around displaying information only in the subset of the environment that a particular user is experiencing. Examples of this approach include some the most commonly known devices today, such as Google Glass and Microsoft’s HoloLens. Challenges to this approach include tracking at “sufficiently high update rates and low latency.”
Implanted AR: The researchers admit this may be the most “extreme” approach to achieving true augmented reality, but another option is not to manipulate the information sent to a user’s perceptual system, as in the prior three approaches, but rather to manipulate the perceptual system itself.
This approach has a long history of being depicted in science fiction, including movies such as The Matrix and Total Recall. This approach may first become widespread as new technologies augment the experience of those with conditions such as blindness. Later, it may be applied to augment the reality of the healthy.
Beyond the technical challenges to achieving true augmented reality, the researchers pause to consider ethics. Imagining such powerful technology, which may permit us to entirely manipulate the human experience of reality, raises big questions: Who will control its deployment? Who will ultimately be in control of its augmented content and for what purposes will it be used? Will individuals be freed or locked into purely commerce-driven experiences? Will augmented reality enhance our quality of life and promote better communication and deeper understanding, or “isolate and project us into a world of delusion?” Open questions.
But as the desire to sate the human imagination has driven the development of other media throughout history, augmented reality will continue to emerge, as advances in disciplines beyond just “optics, computer graphics, and computer vision” converge to make the above approaches possible.
While our experience of this world has in past included physical, biological, ethical and other practical limitations, the researchers note, augmented reality will free us from such boundaries. Market estimates, even in their billions, seem insignificant next to the scale of such ambition.
Read NYC Media Lab’s special report, Exploring Future Reality, here.
FEATURED IMAGE: BRYCE DURBIN