Miscellaneous

Virtual-reality headgear like the Oculus Rift, the Avegant Glyph, and Sony's Morpheus are all the buzz. CNET's Brian Cooley explains the potential impact on gaming and vertical industries where VR might ultimately take root.

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Sugimoto Laboratory, Department of Information and Computer Science, Faculty of Science and Technology, Keio University

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Sailboat racing is as thrilling, dynamic, and suspenseful as any sport—but until now it's made for boring television. No longer. Starting with the 2013 America's Cup, you will be there, virtually speaking.

New augmented reality techniques provide perspectives and information never before available to spectators: the tracks of the boats through the water, course boundaries, penalties issued, wind direction, speed, and other things that significantly affect the outcome of the race.

Read more:
"The Augmented Reality America’s Cup"
Augmented reality is making sailboat racing a thrilling spectator sport

by Stan Honey & Ken Milnes
August 29, 2013

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In this video we use a robot-mounted video projector to virtually revive an old computer.

Navigation of the robot is done with an extended Dynamic Window Approach. Precise localization is needed to get the CRT-monitor into the projectors field of projection.
To achieve this localization accuracy we use an extended Monte Carlo Localization on an Occupancy Grid Map. The map was created using a mapping framework with robust back-end and post map optimization.

The projection correction is done by projecting a known pattern in the scene and re-detecting it in a camera image. A coarse alignment of the projected pattern is currently done manually to facilitate its re-detection. From correspondences of the projected pattern and its re-detection we derive a transformation which aligns a projected image with a desired target in the camera image.

The old computer is revived by running an emulator on the robot and projecting its virtual screen output onto the CRT-monitor. There are still visible distortions in the projected image because the surface of the CRT-monitor is not planar.
Additionally we utilize a clap-detector as input for the game running in the emulator.

For details see the paper "Awakening history: Preparing a museum tour guide robot for augmenting exhibits", ECMR 2013 by Marc Donner, Marian Himstedt, Sven Hellbach and Hans-Joachim Bohme.

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Facing your phobias in a virtual environment could be the best way to conquer them in the real world
Full story here:
"Virtual reality therapy cures fears and phobias"

by Jessica Hamzelou
March 12, 2014

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SRI has developed an augmented reality binocular system for training the forward observer. The technology has been successfully demonstrated as part of a live simulated training system, in which synthetic aircrafts, ground vehicles, and weapon effects are combined with real-world scenes.

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Computer generated experiences complemented by the ability to actually feel and manipulate digital objects in the virtual world are so compelling that they will impact everything from real estate to retail, and healthcare to education.

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Augmented reality technology will revolutionise the way we navigate cities, says of 3D production company Inition in the second part of our interview.

Augmented reality devices that are tiny enough to "sit in your eye" will soon add layers of digital information over the real world, says Millns.

Users will be able to see whole cities with information layered on top of them via tiny devices placed in the eye, completely changing their urban experience, he claims.

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Hyper-Reality presents a provocative and kaleidoscopic new vision of the future, where physical and virtual realities have merged, and the city is saturated in media.

by Keiichi Matsuda | http://km.cx
more at http://hyper-reality.co

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BeTerrific at CES Asia 2016! We talk with VisionerTech CTO Arkin Ai about their Mediated Reality Headset which combines Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality!

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Augmented reality glasses that allow firefighters to see through smoke
Firefighters: Jason Racine, Jean-Marc Pittet, Patrick Di Natale

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Greg Kumparak goes to Lenovo 2016 Tech World in San Francisco and gets a hands-on demo of Lenovo’s augmented reality Tango phone, the Phab 2 Pro.

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The 1st Global Congress of Special Interest Tourism & Hospitality

Name:
Eric Hawkinson
Associate Professor of Learning Design and Technology
The University of Fukuchiyama

Title:
Augmenting Tourism: Augmented Reality Design Principles for Tourism Application

Abstract:
An experiment to examine the potential and design principles of using augmented reality to enhance tourism environments. The ability to mix digital into the real world employs a technology known as augmented reality (AR). The idea is to take information from you and the world around you to then augment that information in a fun or useful way. AR is making another push into the mainstream thanks in big part to the advancement of mobile technology (Wu et al. 2013, Hwang & Wu, 2014). AR takes in information around the learner, this lends affordance to learning environments related to tourism. AR is great for these uses because it incorporates your physical location with GPS data and physical people and things around you with visual data. This study examines several iterations of design and implementation of AR in tourism settings. The results show high interest especially with younger more technology affluent participants, but there are also still major technical barriers to large scale adoption of more advanced features. This project is both creating new tools and examining their use in tourism simultaneously. This makes an opportunity to explore research frameworks that facilitate both the creation of technology tools for tourism but also to examine the research instrumentation that will help collect important data about how effective new technology tools implemented. In presenting the rationale of how and why the design of AR was created and implemented, attention was given to how those designs were tailored to gathering information about their use.

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