From ReadWriteWeb:
An international team of computer scientists has created software that lets anyone perform on-the-fly analysis of live streaming video on the iPhone. Used alongside existing methods of displaying data on top of the camera’s view, this new functionality signals a fundamental change in the kinds of Augmented Reality (AR) that iPhone developers can create. Existing AR apps, like Yelp, Layar, Wikitude and others display data on top of a camera’s view but don’t actually analyze what the camera sees. This new development changes that.
The video is pretty amazing. I can’t wait to see where this tech goes from here…
12 thoughts on “Hacked iPhone API takes AR to the next level”
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Very impressive demo in the video, it certainly raises the bar for what desktop AR can achieve.
But I don’t see an iPhone anywhere in there. Video capture is through a webcam and processing is done on a laptop. Does the article mean they stream video to a desktop and apply AR there?
The reason I’m skeptical is that the demo shows interaction that is impressive even for AR running on a laptop, but the article claims it’s for iPhone. While portable AR has awesome applications, chaining it to a desk is significantly less useful.
Any modern laptop ought to be able to push 2 GFLOPS (2 billion floating-point operations per second) and effective use of SIMD instructions can push that a bit higher. Offload some computation to the GPU with CUDA can get you tens of GFLOPS even on a laptop GPU. The ARM processor in a 3GS may be impressively power-efficient, but you just aren’t going to get the same level of performance on computationally intense applications.
Like physics simulation and video processing.
I’m with you toast, I don’t buy it. Someone’s a wannabe, unless you can let me get my hands on it
If you click through the links, you’ll see that they are offering the source code to the public, so feel free to get your hands on it.
I kept seeing that Ah-ha video…
… has anyone thought of a useful use of AR yet? Layar is just a gimmicky map, this is a gimmicky physics simulation (the sketch analysis doesn’t really have anything to do with AR), etc.
The only thing I’ve seen where AR vaguely adds to things was that tabletop zombie game.
Wow, that’s impressive, but I don’t see how that’s done on an iPhone?