I recently got to know about augmented reality. Its the same thing Terminator does: see things on screen related to his current surroundings. Now that’s an amazing idea. Here’s a video to give you a clearer picture of what this really is: Augmented Reality Encyclopaedia (youtube)

From what I understand as of now, they’ve used something like OpenCV identifying various “markers”. And the software renders 3D objects at the location of these markers using something like OpenGL or DirectX. But exactly how it identifies those markers’ orientation is a mystery to me (notice how the objects tilt as the page is flipped over). If you’ve got any ideas, please do leave a comment, or contact me

If its possible to integrate something like that with the human eye/brain, you’ll have pretty much everything at your fingertips if you’re connected to the internet. And work is going on in this field. Research on the “Bumptop” has been going on pretty well. It isn’t exactly augmented reality, but it should be really easy to extend its idea: The Bumptop (ted)

All these things seem to be way too amazing. So I decided to put a bit of thought into augmented reality as well. And came up with the idea of mixing some real magic with augmented reality. And upon searching the internet, I got to know that a few people already had this idea!! Augmented Reality Magic 1.0 (youtube)

Maybe I’ll try my hand at augmented magic this summer. I do know OpenCV, and I have a good enough grasp on OpenGL. So theoretically I should be able to come up with something. If I get time at the summer “internship” that is.

I’ll be leaving tomorrow for Chandigarh for the “internship” at CSIO. A few days of travel and settling in, and I’ll be back with more articles on image processing. Currently in the pipeline are: hough transforms, generating different types of noise based on the different Noise Models, and something related to moments.

The next post will be from Chandigarh.

Ten days at a research facility Shaastra '08