this is cool.

Reminds me of who framed roger rabbit

Ive seen augmented reality before, but nothing on this level. Playstation 3's "Eye of Judgment" does this, but it has to have those weird squares. This appears to do it without that requirement.

Also, what's the deal with Japaneses shows that always show the audience reaction?

PlayStation Eye anybody?

Does this mean I can actually have sex with Virtual Jenna now?

This is fantastic, I see many applications for this tech in the near future. With a set of light weight transparent glasses, wirelessly connected to the computer, one could create entire 3d manipulative environments. This will probably show up in the advertisement sector first, then who knows maybe some day our car windshields will have transparent screens within them, viewing billboards will never be the same.

There was some similarly awesome stuff a siggraph this year with mocap. they had a dancer with no mocap suit or dots and it was recreating her in 3d and recording her performance.

The fact this is working on a Laptop and not some specialist hardware is pretty neat tho

@wizzledizzle: haha crazy mofo's coming outta Toon Town.

I was at Cebit and saw this car magazine with the same technologi. When she held the magazine up to the camera a car came popping up on the frontpage. The car was like glued to the page cause when she turned the magazine up and down / to the sides the car was in the same spot. When she opened the magazine the was realtime 3d animation as a replacement for pictures.
That reminds me, i seen this video on the net of a guy controlling a virtual car and helicopter..
The only real thin was the controller.. that was cool!

I guess we will be seeing a new Pixar film every month if they get their hands on this.

they're pulling some sick Macgyver shit over there...a miniDV camera, tabletop tripod and a DELL. YAHTZEE!

I'm impressed.

I don't believe it. I don't think it can take any picture and turn it to 3d.
Like with the chair; they take a picture of the chair then shoot a picture of a big blue thing sitting in the chair. This is not done with software but in reality.

some of that background music sounds like the theme from stargate atlantis

The problem with extending this sort of augmented reality to the real world is properly detecting the surface on which to project the 3d image. I've implemented some object recognition stuff before, and it is highly sensitive to the presence of complicated textures. For instance, you will notice that the chair in the demo is textured in a non-uniform pattern so that the computer can determine the position and orientation. Things get a lot hairier if it's a standard office chair with a repeating texture.

OMG, Bonzy Buddy hasn't aged well. But seriously... Now all those card games will actually look cooler to the expectator (sans PlayStation Eye).

Cool to see augmented reality projects starting to hit the mainstream. About a year ago, saw on the news a demonstration like this, except it was fairly slow and used a simple model (a bird house on a book). This looks like it's giving almost 30 fps.

Looking forward to the day you can walk down the street with some camera embedded glasses, look at what appears to be a wall, and it's actually a virtual info kiosk or the like.

VR Pop-up pr0n mags, FTW!

@M. Schlabach: I'm assuming that the generated 3D images are programmed and stored on the some computer. Then the software overlays that 3d image onto the video screen based on the pattern it sees. The program's gotta be using some anchor points on the image to calculate when the image is rotating and how to rotate the 3D images correspondingly.

ANYWAYS, that's my take on it. In that light, it doesn't seem all that impressive.

Oh wait...I think I was thinking of something else. Maybe this is really cool. Damn now i'm confused.

DABU is right. Each pattern does have enbedded information that the computer can recognize to project a certain image (object). What's also crucial is that the 2D pattern/picture the camera sees need at least two straight lines in the picture that are at a different angle to be able to see the rotational changes. The part that sucks about this video is that it ended at a point where they were claiming to show a never-before-seen-on-camera SUGOI! thing "after the break". Oh, well...

If you anyone wants to play around with this, they actually have had an example of this on the tour at NHK studios. Good times... for the kids of course.

Even if you explain it as easy, it's still pretty amazing. Doesn't Sugoi mean amazing by the way?

Wow it's running smooth in a Dell! Must be very light!

when doing 3d graphics mixed with real video this is called matchmoving. its pretty impressive seeing it in real time though. it can be quite a task getting a good track from random video sources...

@UNDEADMACHINE: it appeared they were calibrating x, y, and z axes with the camera aimed at one spot. if the camera were to move they'd have to recalibrate. otherwise, pretty damn cool.

@PALESTINA: must have been one of those custom "clean install" models. haha!

the whole thing is actually quite easy. it is some kind of "realtime tracking" of positions and overlaying this with realtime 3d graphics combined with the actual videographic. we are just at the beginning of this, it will start to work better once video-glasses with built in cameras will come. so sony: why not inventing bravia-handycam-glasses with a built in PSP II? ;-)

now that is bad ass... lol

simply brilliant

@WHISKEY, um hey, what the fuck is an 'expectator'? Did your first language become your second?
Derrrr...

Excuse me, but I can't read while you're doing that!

Image shot of me looking amazed.

That's really cool...

Am I the first one to catch on the the implications are for porn industry? Soon we could all have hologirls like on the 6th day (or atleast brag about doing some hot chick and catching it on video and showing it to our buddies)

My thoughts entirely. Soon, very soon I will be making sweet, sweet luv with a big blue gorilla thing!

This is very old technology. Look into ARToolkit at the University of Washington. [www.hitl.washington.edu]

Um, I think it is a big improvement over prior tech. Judge for yourself at the website which was mentioned in the original videos. [www.t-immersion.com]

I feel like Japanese people really don't know how to react to things, so they need the picture-in-picture for all their TV shows.

This is Virtual Light - a live overlay. Now all we need is better goggles.

Someone get Hugh Hefner involved.

What happened to the similar tech that was demoed a couple years ago, where they had someone holding a virtual rose, and had a virtual truck driving over real terrain on a table?

There are a dozen companies doing this stuff along with tons of research groups, and it has been going on for years. If you look around there is one were the camera is fixed onto display goggles and you can drop objects into the environment in real time and preview them. It was all flat shaded at the time but it is also 3 years old and done by a university research group.