Computer Graphics World

MARCH 2010

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■ ■ ■ ■ Augmented Reality ith the skill of a skater executing a triple Lutz, three companies— Yahoo, Total Immersion, and Helios—created a technically innovative augmented reality (AR) application for fans and athletes at the 2010 Olympics. “We probably developed the project in 30 days,” says Greg Davis, North American general manager for Total Immersion. T e goal? “We wanted an innovative, fun way to make an audience aware of Yahoo features in a mobile phone,” says Barbara O’Connor, vice president of Yahoo’s global consumer marketing. Helios installed the interactive AR experi- ence outside Yahoo’s “Fancouver” venue in downtown Vancouver, British Columbia. Total Immersion created the experience—actually, two experiences—using its D’Fusion software. Both experiences relied on 46-inch, thin- bezel Samsung monitors installed in “win- dows” on the outside walls of the Fancouver building. “You can see that they’re fabricated, wrapped in vinyl,” says Davis. Inside, power- ing the experiences, are dual-core Pentium- based “black boxes” equipped with AMD ATI 4870 graphics cards. For the fi rst experience, News, Weather, and Sports, a prosumer Canon HD video camera points down from above the display window. When people walk up to the display, they see three options: If they stand on the left, a fedora pops onto their head and a larger-than-life mo- bile phone shows a news feed with the latest sport scores. Stand in the middle and they see a weather report while decked out in appropriate gear—an umbrella hat, sunglasses, or wool hat. Stand on the right, and they’ll fi nd themselves wearing a baseball cap with a country fl ag and 44 March 2010 looking at a live feed with the most current medal count. To do this, Total Immersion’s D’Fusion soft- ware runs image-recognition algorithms on the incoming video stream to search for a face. “When it fi nds the face, it knows it must place a digital object relative to the target,” Davis says. And, it knows whether to place the cor- rect objects in the left, middle, or right screen. “It’s tracking the X axis,” Davis says. “So as the person moves, we can put virtual environ- hats, things that stay close to the face. We’re using the face to track and put things on it, but we’re also putting things around the face. As someone moves left or right, we can have things move around them.” T e second experience was a snowboarding AR video game. Here’s how it worked: Yahoo had people stationed near the venue handing out cards. On one side were instructions about how to connect to Yahoo mobile; the other side was an interaction device. When people This visitor at Yahoo’s Fancouver venue during the 2010 Olympics knows the weather report calls for snow because a woolen cap popped onto his head in augmented reality. ments around them that are reactive. For quite a while we’ve been stuck with little interpreta- tions of face tracking and seeing the same ex- ecution over and over again—glasses, beards, walk up to the screen, it’s as if they’re looking into a mirror, but, as in the fi rst experience, it’s actually a video projection from the HD camera mounted beneath the screen.

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