Skip to main content

Robot Marker for Augmented Reality

This sounds a lot more like a commercial than I would normally share here, but the concept is unique; using a small spherical robot as a real time marker for your 3D Augmented Reality character to manifest on. This gives you flexibility and mobility not previously available to interact with your environment. While the usage they are targeting is within a game, the potential applications range far beyond that.

For instance, this could be used as a personal tour guide in a museum, slaved to a GPS, a museum map, and an extensive database of facts on each exhibit, along with speech recognition processing. It would be able to answer your every question about any exhibit in great detail. Or linked to the camera and a library of geometry and trigonometry functions, you could use nearby buildings and moving vehicles to learn various math functions with literally real world examples, and again query the system to get a full understanding of what you were learning, with your virtual tutor traveling your city or town with you.

OK, for the outdoor applications you might want to carry a pocketful of the round robots with you, to replace the ones crushed under city bus tires or swept into storm drains by sudden showers as you go along. But those bots are extremely simple, and after another 6 months of producing them ought to become quite cheep as well, making their use in such environments quite cost effective. Thanks to Tech Crunch for the heads up on this one.

How Science comes from Telescopes

Over at the Albert Einstein Planetarium this afternoon there will be a presentation explaining (in very simple terms) how we can take a huge amount of raw data out of any one of our observatories and turn it into an actual understanding of how the Universe works. Converting that data into quantitative science (things we can measure, test, and extrapolate rules from) and pictures or videos that allow us to see those rules in action is the real goal of astronomy. If you would enjoy having a better understanding of this process, stop by the Universe of Data: How we get Science out of Space Telescopes presentation and let Jonathan McDowell, an Astrophysicist from the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, give you the introduction. If you do make it, be sure to say hi.

BrainBots

Ready to learn how to run your own brainwave controlled robot? Yes, I know a real robot would have its own self-contained intelligence system rather than being teleoperated, but still this is pretty cool. This report from DigInfo is about a joint French and Japanese robotics project that could grant freedom undreamed of to paraplegics and other physically challenged folks. Of course, it is also the path leading to the kind of world made popular in the Bruce Willis movie Surrogates, but every advance comes with a potential dark side attached.

Nova Augmented Reality

The folks over at Scientific American posted about tomorrow night’s Nova program What Will the Future Be Like, because it is hosted by one of their columnists/scientists. As you can see from the video they shared, Augmented Reality is one of the approaches they investigate. Yes, there are a lot of AR Apps already available, but we have barely scratched the surface on what is possible. I am setting my DVR for the program, just in case they don’t stream it after.