Sean Walther's Blog

GE Smart Grid Augmented Reality and FLArToolkit

If you haven’t seen the many internet postings about the website, check out the video below.  Even better, if you have a camera and a printer handy, check out GE Smart Grid Augmented Reality. The reason being the “cool” part about the site is the ability to put it’s 3d animation in your “hands” through your web camera.  Just print out the pattern, and you can do it.

The more interesting part is: how do they do it?

We had posted an article on this technology back in December, Papervision Augmented Reality.  Look familiar now?  It’s pretty easy to see that this is the same core technology.  I can’t say for sure whether they use the FLARToolkit and Papervision (which the original post described) but if they didn’t, there are 2 similiar tools.  

The greatest thing about this, is that this is only the beginning.  I have many ideas for commercial applications with this technology (which I won’t share, because I can make money off that… send me an email if you want to discuss this privately).  I’m sure you can come up with a few on your own.

Watch the video, it will probably bring everything together.  Great job GE in taking a publically available technology, and “finishing” the idea with some nice execution.

Tags: Actionscript, FLARToolkit, Flash, GE, Papervision

Papervision Augmented Reality

In the 2008 presidential elections, CNN had some pretty “cheesy” special effects.  

CNN tried to involve “holograms” (they were far from holograms technically) into their live coverage.  In reality, it was mostly augmented reality that they were using.  Give them credit for trying something new.  It would have been nice for them not to say it was a hologram.  For the next 5 years people are going to see real holograms and say they saw CNN do it better in 2008.  

Boffswana (formerly Digital Pictures Interactive) has published the source code to a Papervision and Flash powered augmented reality.  

Papervision – Augmented Reality, lets you print out a symbol and place it on your desk.  When you start up the flash movie and let it access your video camera, you can move a 3d object around in the flash movie — augmented reality .. not a hologram — and see a 3d monster object move around as if he were on top of it.  

They provide source code and printouts.  How fun.

The project requires Papervision and FLARToolkit libraries.  

A video from there site is below:

Papervision – Augmented Reality (extended) from Boffswana on Vimeo.

Tags: Augmented Reality, Boffswana, CNN, FLARToolkit, Flash, hologram, Papervision