Go Orna-Mental for the Holidays!

With the holiday season right around the corner, we thought we'd give everyone an early present... Shiny Ballz!!!! I know, best present ever!!! And we didn't even see your Wishlist.

Back in the depths of our workshop, the little elves at Talking Dog have developed Shiny Ballz, a fun way for you to decorate AR Christmas ornaments and share pictures of them with your friends on Facebook. Not only can you color these shiny ornaments of awesomeness any way you like, but you can add a special holiday message for your friends and family. Think of it as a cool, new way to thank Nana for those knitted socks she keeps sending every year.

So how does it work? First, make sure your webcam is hooked up, then go to the website. Print off the black & white marker and fold it according to the instructions. Next, click "allow" to activate your webcam and faster than you can say "Pass the Nog" you are ready to start creating some personalized shiny ballz.

Here's a little video to show you how it's done. Notice what's unusual about this: you can create your designs by drawing in the square underneath the various tool buttons. Or you can paint directly onto your Augmented Reality ornament, just like in your old arts and crafts class!

Don't forget to try it out at www.talkingdogstudios.com/ar/shinyballz

Don't the Holidays just make you feel all warm and fuzzy?

Happy DecembAR!

The Talking Dog AR Team

Augmented Reality Ventriloquism

Here we are with some more Faceball experiments! If you've been following along with our AR demos so far, then you've seen that Talking Dog Studios has been working on a series of web pages that use both marker-tracking and face-tracking technologies to grab the real-time image of your face and map it in various creative ways.

Starting with expandar.com (pictured at left) and Alice in AR Land (at right), we showed you some of the startling effects that can be achieved with just face-tracking. Then, with Faceball 1, we added in the marker, which let you map your own face to a sphere. And with Faceball 2, we showed you how this could allow you to hold your head in your hands.

If you were wondering where we would take this next, take a look at Faceball demo 3:


This one shows you how it's possible to become other characters, like in our Alice in Wonderland page, except that the character is more convincingly part of the real world.

Where, you might be wondering, will we go after this? No need to wonder any longer, because we've gone ahead and created a finished application from these demos. The culmination of all our hard work and experimentation has come down to this one point:

AR ventriloquism.

That's right, you can create dialogues between yourself and your virtual self in much the same way that real ventriloquists do. Check out our coder Rene Dufour-Contreras, who wrote and performed this strangely existential piece about a guy realizing he's just a virtual head:


Notice that Rene's mouth is covered with a still image of his mouth when the dummy is talking and the dummy's mouth does not move when Rene is speaking. You can try this, and all the other faceball demos out at www.talkingdogstudios.com/ar/faceball

This is just one application for this technology. By mapping a person's face in real time to a character in a game they are playing, or in a movie they are watching, you are creating a much more personal and engaging experience for them. Could your next project use this new innovation? Give it some thought and give us a call!

Augmentedly,

The Talking Dog AR team

AR and Historical Re-creations

The above picture comes from the wikipedia article on Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada. The picture is entitled "young man poses with huge pile of buffalo bones ready to be shipped".

Here at Talking Dog Studios in our on-going exploration of augmented reality, we've started investigating the world of mobile AR. The Layar app for iPhone and Google Android phones seemed to be the most obvious place to start. We have been thinking about AR, tourism and places of historical interest ever since we made our AR project for Saskatchewan Tourism so it seemed logical to take that a little further.

We started out by trying to put simple "Points of Interest" (POI) in our parking lot here at Talking Dog. We thought it would also be interesting to explore Saskatchewan's history of buffalo herds: the original name for the city we live in was "Pile of Bones", and it got its name from the huge piles of bones that were left behind by the buffalo hunters in the area.

So, through a little tinkering we built ourselves a herd of buffalo taking up all of our parking spots. This picture is of 100 virtual buffalo as seen from google maps (currently this is not publicly visible).

(Incidentally, bison is the more correct term for these animals, but buffalo still tends to be what people around here say in conversation).

At Talking Dog we understand the importance of sound to create a believable experience. To add to the realism we also allowed for the sound of a herd to be triggered when you get within a certain distance.

Next, we placed our herd of 3d buffalo models we had created in a field adjacent to Regina's Royal Saskatchewan Museum.


We're very excited by the possibilities of historical re-creations using mobile devices, and this seems like a good start. At present our herd of buffalo can only be seen if you come to the open space south east of the Royal Saskatchewan Museum here in Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada.

This project should be published relatively soon, and we'll be sure to spread the word when we have it up. As always, follow us on twitter for more up to the minute updates on what's going on in AR.

Here's to our augmented future!

The Talking Dog AR team.

Crazy Wakeboarder

We had a great time at the Saskatchewan Communications Expo Tradeshow last week, introducing Augmented Reality to a number of curious onlookers and media professionals who had not come across this exciting tool before. People really got a kick out of our "Crazy Wakeboarder" which is a fun diversion, but it's also a fairly unique example of what you can do with a little creativity: unlike most AR projects, where the 3D images are generated "above" the marker, in this case everything is "behind" the marker, so it's like you're looking through a window into another world. If you twist the marker you can look up into the sky, or look down at the frothing water, or look left and right to see the skyline of Waskesiu Lake, which is one of the popular vacation sites located right here in our home province of Saskatchewan, Canada.

Here's a video demonstrating our 3D animated "Crazy Wakeboarder" doing his tricks out on the water.

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_4E7QW-mMzM

If you'd like to try it out yourself, here's the link:
http://www.talkingdogstudios.com/sasktourism/


By the way, there'll be audio geeks out there who recognize the Wilhelm Scream is the sound our wakeboarder makes when he wipes out. If you're not familiar with this "sound designer's inside joke" check out the wikipedia article on the subject here.

Best augmented wishes to you all,

Talking Dog Studios

How Big is a Planet?

Here at Talking Dog Studios, we've been creating Augmented Reality projects for a while now. We've recently put up a couple of free sites for people to play with, both have similar designs but will likely appeal to very different groups.

The one that just went up now is called "How Big is a Planet?". You can go to the website and try it out yourself, it's at howbigisaplanet.com . Here's a video demonstrating how the site works:


A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UiXhrDLhvRg

We think there's something about actually seeing the scale of related things when you hold them in your hand that sticks in your memory more than just reading about such things. Seeing yourself hold Mars and then seeing yourself hold Jupiter gives you a "mental slap" that makes it more likely to remember this kind of information. The following site is based upon the same principle, but this time we're comparing the relative sizes of a developing baby during its nine months of development in the womb. Here's a video:

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pkuEXH1pTCQ

Again, it's one thing to read about how teeny an embryo is only one month after the egg has been fertilized, and it's quite another to hold it in your hand. If you'd like to try it out yourself please go to howbigisthebaby.com . Both of these sites would make great teaching aids, but they're also just fun to play with. One thing to note - once you have the marker showing the baby or the planet in the position you like, you can quickly take the marker out of view and the object remains, useful if you want to see yourself with these planets and babies without having to hold the tag. And when you see something you like, you can click on the "Take a Picture" button and save a picture of yourself to your hard drive, or automatically share it with your friends on facebook.

Is taking a picture of yourself with a baby in front of your tummy a good way to let your family know you're expecting? Well, that's a personal decision. But having watched both kids and adults have a great time playing with these websites, we're hoping that you will enjoy them as well.

If you'd like to know more about Talking Dog Studios and augmented reality, here's a link to our website.

Augmenting the world, one website at a time,

The Talking Dog Team

How Big is the Baby - video

Hey, check out the new movie we've just put up demonstrating How Big is the Baby!


A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pkuEXH1pTCQ

Pretty cool, huh? Be sure to send us any of your favorite pictures of you with your virtual baby to ar@talkingdogstudios.com

Cheers!

Talking Dog