Waiting for the time when cars will drive themselves, there are some interesting experimental apps around aimed at assisting drivers in various ways.
One of them is Wikitude Drive, its Augmented reality view allows driver to check directions without losing contact with the street.
Toyota Glass of Water is a sort of game that should make people drive in a more ecofriendly way puting a virtual glass of water on the dashboard and asking not to spill it. I don’t know if it really works but I like the concept.
In Japan Toyota launched Backseat Driver an Iphone game to entertain kids while parents are driving making the kids aware of the root. That’s an interesting way of using real world context in a game and can help the driver to drive better since kids are entertained and they already know how long it will take..
via Creative Review
Yesterday I attended a Projection Mapping workshop held by Giuseppe Torre. Projection mapping is based on projecting images or videos on non-flat surfaces creating fake geometry or visual effects on top of real geometry.
One the most relevant examples is the Ralph Lauren London flagship store projection
What we learned at the workshop
first of all you need some powerful projectors, 4 projectors at 10.000 lumens it’s a starting point. From the software point of view there’s not an industry standard, I appreciated that the workshop was conducted using only free software.
The scene taken with Kinect webcam
We worked with a simple setup: 3 white boxes on a table. We used a webcam positioned on top of the projector to have a picture of the scene, we then used Gimp to build a mask for the boxes on the scene, since we were working on a small scale I found it easier to work directly on the projector. To have a precise map the camera focal length have to be the same as the projector.
Mask of the scene
Once we had the mask, we used VPT 6 to play a masked movie on the scene. VPT is a realtime projection software aimed at video mapping, using it was a bit painful since the interface is not friendly (at least for me) and it crashed a couple of time. But after a while a was able to project 4 different videos stretched in accordance to the scene.
2 stretched videos in VPT 6
The last experiment was based on Blender, using Microsoft Kinect we captured a 3d mesh of the scene and imported it in a 3D scene. Once we had the 3-dimensional model of the scene it was possible to create some advanced optical illusions to be projected.
The final result was nice considering that we’ve done everything in 5 hours. I now have a good idea of what is possible to do with projection mapping.
From what I’ve seen so far I believe projection mapping can give nice results in enhancing building facades, for example it can be used to focus attention on some details in an engaging way. Unfortunately most of the videos I’ve seen so far are just techy eye-candys becoming boring after 30 seconds.
Since the widespread diffusion of webcams embed in laptop and desktop computers there are many web-based projects asking people to take part with their own images.
Persuade people in front of a computer to turn on the webcam and gift his image to your cause is not that obvious as it appears.
The project asks people to return the greating to Aznar. It is a response to the hand gesture done by the former spanish PM to protesting students at Oviedo University. Here the full story.
To celebrate the 10th anniversary if KORT film festival, the graphic designer Jonathan Puckey made this interactive project asking people to play a few seconds rehearsal in front of their webcam. nowtakeabow.com
From the same author, Jonathan Puckey, a similar project is
If the previous 3 projects ask users to show their faces the Lost Valentinos’s is quite the opposite. Using augmented reality visual markers and cutted out videos the project ask people to create a set for the band videoclip. Here is a youtube video explaining the project. lostvalentinos.com
