Thanks to everyone who attended my Augmented Reality workshop this afternoon at the NMC 2010 Summer Conference! I’ve posted all of the materials referenced in the session, including downloadable versions of the Flash templates that we covered in class . Everything is accessible via the ‘Getting Started with AR’ link at the top of this page.
If you have any questions please don’t hesitate to get in touch – thanks again for a great session!
Over the last few weeks a number of ZooBursters have gotten in touch to ask if there was a way in which they could interact with their 3D pop-up books without having to print out an augmented reality marker. Many people don’t have easy access to a decent quality printer, and while you can use an external device in place of a marker (see Greg Borenstein’s exploration into using an iPad in place of an AR marker) the glare issues that arise from using a backlit display can be a bit difficult to overcome. Plus it’s hard to enjoy your 3D creation while holding something up in front of your screen!
In response to these issues I’ve built an experimental features that lets you display your ZooBurst book on the screen without needing to have an AR marker handy. Once activated, this feature will cause your book to fall out of the sky and bounce into place along the bottom of the video field (see image below). In addition, a new control tab also appears at the top of the page – this tab “listens” for “swipes” in the video feed. When detected, these swipes can be used to control the page turning action.
Controlling a ZooBurst book using physical gestures
Here’s a quick video of how the new feature works:
T-minus 9 days until the premier educational technology event of the year – the annual New Media Consortium Summer Conference! This year’s program is looking better than ever with sessions and workshops focusing on a wide range of topics, such as educational gaming, virtual worlds, mobile applications, geolocation technologies, cloud-based learning systems, digital storytelling techniques and yes, of course, Augmented Reality!
NMC 2010 Summer Conference
This year I will be presenting a half-day hands-on session in which we will explore emerging educational applications of augmented reality as well as introducing ways in which educators can build their own AR environments. I’m busily preparing a number of fun tutorials for this event, including:
If you’ll be in Anaheim CA next week and would like to join us feel free to register!
ZooBurst has been getting tons of use over the last few weeks, and I’ve been spending most of my free time making updates to the system and thinking of ways to move forward with the environment. It’s really amazing how fast it’s taken off – as of today we have over 1,000 people actively using the system to create their own 3D pop-up books!
There are a ton of features on my “to-do” list for ZooBurst, but one of the most pressing is to find a way to make the augmented reality feature more usable. Right now you can watch as your own books fly out of the printed symbol and into the world around you, but in order to interact with the book (i.e. turn the page, make a character speak) you still need to use the mouse.
ZooBurst augmented reality mode
I’ve toyed around with a number of potential interaction methods, including using the rotation of the marker to control various elements, but I’m not 100% happy with them just yet. I want to try and preserve the feeling of a real book as much as possible, and creating additional mappings that don’t necessarily apply to a physical book is something that I’d like to try and avoid.
One experiment I’ve been playing around with is the idea of using physical gestures to actually turn the pages of the book. I whipped up a quick 2D demo of this in action – basically I use motion detection in very small regions of the screen to create a matrix of “touchable” sensors. From there I can create a simple algorithm to interpret gestures based on the order in which these regions are activated. Here’s an example that allows you to simulate a coverflow-style interface with a series of images. I’m hoping to adapt this functionality into the 3D world of ZooBurst by the next release of its AR viewer component.
2D coverflow using a webcam
It was only a matter of time. My poor iPhone was mortally wounded back in January at the Lambertville Beer and Chili Festival. While it continued to function like a trooper, I figured it was about time to let it move on to greener pastures. Plus I didn’t want to have to continue to deal with all the pitiful (disgusted?) looks that I was getting from people on the subway whenever I had my phone out.
cracked screen = no fun
I decided to switch it up a bit and see what life is like in Android land, and I’ve got to say I’m really enjoying it so far. I ended up getting the new HTC Incredible which sports a 1ghz Snapdragon processor, 512mb of ram and an amazingly crisp 8 megapixel camera. The difference between browsing speed on AT&T versus Verizon is unbelievable, especially in NYC. Pages that would chug on my iPhone load quickly on the Incredible. In addition, I found an amazingly helpful application (’The Missing Sync‘) that lets me wirelessly sync all of my desktop content – including my music – to my phone whenever the two devices are on the same wireless network. No more USB syncing with iTunes – yay 
The built in camera takes great photos and sports a software based digital zoom as well as a “tap to focus” feature that lets you isolate subjects in your shot easily. Here’s a scaled down image of my pup, Prue, that I took using the built-in cam the other night.
my pup, prue
One of my favorite features of the phone is that it runs Flash Lite. ZooBurst even loads on the phone, which really surprised me since I use a ton of external 3D libraries that I thought wouldn’t be compatible. With that said, let me say that I’m as excited as everyone else to see what HTML 5 will eventually bring to the table, but right now there are things that Flash can do on the web easily that just aren’t possible with other languages (including all of my augmented reality experiments). I’m really psyched about the full version of Flash mobile that is supposedly coming out this summer. I wonder how easy it will be to port some of my AR demos to run on Android … I’ll keep you all posted!