How fun would it be if you could program it with facial recognition and replace con attendants with their fursonas? :D
Obvious Engine: a vision-based augmented reality engine for indie games
11–14 of 14 posts
Re: Obvious Engine: a vision-based augmented reality engine for indie games
#12Now implement a raytracer that infers lighting location and reflectance (and subsurface scattering) of the objects in the scene from the image and then we can have a whole new level of realism. In all seriousness, though, I do wonder what kind of processing power you would need in a handheld device to be able to do that. Could we realistically achieve it within 15-20 years? It's certainly one of those "gimmicks" with…
Fully detecting a scene's lighting is a complex problem. This paper from last year was quite interesting: "Rendering Synthetic Objects into Legacy Photographs" - http://kevinkarsch.com/publications/sa11.html
This combined with existing techniques of constructing 3D geometry out of videos could work really well if say you wish to construct a game level out of a real scene.
Raytracing complex scenes on a hand-held device at interactive frame rates is still quite a bit off. But techniques where a lot of the calculations can be done offline are possible to use today (radiosity, etc).
Re: Obvious Engine: a vision-based augmented reality engine for indie games
#13This is really cool, but im not sure - how is it supposed to be used in games? Reality cant possibly be a better playground than specifically tailored VR. I always saw AR as a convenient way to provide additional data on surroundings. Point out landmarks using a HUD in a car. A nice way to present information on a product (like an artificial "the company making this product supports SOPA" sticker :) ). But I am reall…
I can imagine several possibilities. Maybe something multiplayer using real terrain, like a scavenger hunt--you could mark objects and leave clues with this sort of tool. In fact, any sort of game that involves actually moving around could benefit from this, and I think games like that could be very interesting.
Another thought is board/card games (like Magic: The Gathering) could benefit from this. You could get nice little animation when you play your cards--not terribly useful, but could be very amusing. You could also have wizard chess like Harry Potter (sort of).
Really, the big trick is being able to integrate with the outside world. So this won't be great for entirely virtual games, but could be used as a "hook" into physical games.
Re: Obvious Engine: a vision-based augmented reality engine for indie games
#14Games? Imagine Google giving away augmented reality glasses (let's call them Googgles) that help you find your way in the environment by allowing you to do a local search ('where are my car keys?'), by adding name tags to people you have seen before but do not know well, etc.
Now, that giving away comes at a price. Frequently, when a Dr. Pepper can enters your visual field, that can becomes an animated advert. Your glasses will know how to time those adverts so that they stay (just) below the nuisance point, because they will have read your gmail and that of your friends, and will know what you ate.