Day 4: Downpour

British weather indeed, got caught in an unexpected downpour that soaked me through on the way out for lunch today - had to stop off home and ended up spending the rest of the afternoon working from the comfort of my house.

Google Glass and Canon's MReal

Further research into state of the art AR technology unearthed an obvious candidate: Google Glass, the futuristic pair of sleek glasses with much gadgetry spirited inside. "Much gadgetry" meaning a 640x360 display that appears to the upper right of your eyes, a 5MP 720p video recording camera, 16GB of flash memory, bluetooth and wifi but no GPS. You control the device with voice commands and a touchpad on the arm piece (which rests to the side of your head).

Glassy

The augmented reality of this thing is limited (because the display itself is tiny and at the corner of vision out of the way rather than being superimposed over your entire view) and at the moment functions include recording videos and doing stuff smartphones usually do - but there are various possibilities. Since the camera sees what you see, the display can bring up facts about the tourist attractions you are looking at. It can suggest nearby points of interest and intuitively direct you to them (although with no GPS it may be a little rough), and bring up standard heads-up information and statistics.

Another AR system recently released in the US, is Canon's MReal. It is much more practical in the augmented reality department seeing as the video overlay covers your entire view, and much less practical in the price department because it costs $125,000... Oh, and $25,000 a year for maintenance.


Welcome back, anyway it's purpose is in fact to bring Augmented Reality to enterprises, research universities, and industry - for which it holds promising abilities.

Standard issue X-Wing fighter headwear

The main attraction of these head-mounted augmented reality systems is to provide a user the ability to interact with 3D models in the real world, in an intuitive and engaging manner, as demonstrated by Scope Technologies in the following YouTube video:

Scope Technologies Augmented Reality Training Pump Demo

(So people doing complicated jobs can get superimposed 3D imagery to instruct them in their arcane practices)

More interesting to this blog are the AR techniques that have been demonstrated by these systems:

• Measuring the distance of the viewer's head from the model in question and increasing texture detail when they move in for a closer look
• Superimposing instructions on how to operate and repair machinery
• A box covered inside and out with marker codes opens to reveal a bouquet of flowers, and tapping different marker codes changes their colour as a bee buzzes around. You can open and close the box and move it about and the graphics match up smoothly.
• Museum demo: wall and tables covered in codes becomes a Jurassic landscape in which you can walk about. A Dinosaur wonders about your feet and giant predators lumber off in the distance.

Windows laptop that can run the Augmented Reality Demo, part 2

When the AR demo had been run (or attempted to be run) on the laptop previously it provided a useful error message explaining that there was not enough "something" (which may have been graphics memory, or perhaps some other resource), in which case speccing a new laptop that overcomes that issue is simple. Unfortunately as mentioned yesterday attempting to run the AR demo software nowadays results in it silently closing without any indication of why it hasn't run. So I set about reinstalling the whole thing.

Installed the webcam drivers and tested the webcam to ensure it was properly working and recognized (an attached webcam is the only requirement of the AR demo program).

Repaired all the relevant existing software (XNA, Alvar toolkit, OpenCV, etc) to see if that made a difference (it didn't).

Tried debugging the source files in VisualStudio. Didn't turn up any issues, it builds and runs apparently fine (no errors, but one warning about a lock - I'll add details here when I get back to the laptop).

Tried remaking the AR Demo executable from the source code. Packaged and published the source project from VisualStudio but the resulting file still did not work (it keeps silent closing no matter what I try).

It is possible the source code has been accidentally modified or some of it is missing, tomorrow I'll try restoring the source code from the drop box files and reinstalling it again. And I should also check with Toby  that I'm installing this right. Which reminds me, I'm going to be meeting with Andy tomorrow! Should have a nice explanation of the source code from him which will likely help out in this task, so I'm looking forward to it.

Porting the AR demo to Mac

The current AR demo program was written in XNA, which is currently Windows exclusive. However, an open source project called MonoGame allows you to develop XNA code on other platforms via a cross platform IDE called MonoDevelop. A blog post pointed out by Toby details how to set this up on a Macbook Pro.

I followed the instructions and fully installed MonoDevelop and MonoGame. At the moment I can write a sample XNA program, but it is failing to build with several error messages all saying "xxx has already been defined". I presume I need to mess about with the references a little, hopefully that will fix it and let me write a simple XNA application. If it succeeds I can move on to the actual porting of the AR demo code.

More tomorrow!