Augmented Reality Cake

Craft & Design Food & Beverage

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Justin Blinder frosted this fiduciary marker onto a cake, allowing him to layer on some graphics that move with the scene.

Recently being faced with the task of making (or buying) a decorative cake, I decided to see if Augmented Reality could come to my rescue. I FAIL horribly at baking, and hoped this time a dash of c++ and a AR marker or two could detract attention from my poor baking/frosting skills. Being quite crunched for time, I opted for a conservative and traditional design, which included a rainbow/dolphin inhabited scene with a unicorn ridden by sad Keanu. After baking the cake, I found a simple BCH marker on the web and iced it onto the top. Any marker that has a basic enough grid structure will seem to work, just as long as there is even spacing between the blocks on the marker. The coding was fairly basic, and after a little time orienting things in 3d space, the cake was finished.

The main lesson learned is that Augmented Reality will only compensate for poor cake making skills in the right company. This cake was programmed using openFrameworks and ofxARToolkitPlus… and tasted mediocre.

More:

(so many) CAKEs at CRAFT

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Becky Stern is a Content Creator at Autodesk/Instructables, and part time faculty at New York’s School of Visual Arts Products of Design grad program. Making and sharing are her two biggest passions, and she's created hundreds of free online DIY tutorials and videos, mostly about technology and its intersection with crafts. Find her @bekathwia on YouTube/Twitter/Instagram.

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