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.

How Big Is the TV?

Our newest project "How Big Is the TV?" allows you to try out TVs of different sizes in your own home. We've selected a number of flat screen TVs for users to test and we plan to expand the selection over time. Be sure to print out the marker and try it out. Once you decide on which TV suits you best, clicking on the "Buy Now" button takes you to a popular page which compares the prices of that particular model from various retailers. And don't forget the "take a picture" button which lets you share the picture of the TV you're interested in with others on facebook, or you can save the picture to your computer.

Here's our demo video:


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JaGPpgDDrjM

This project is a more practical follow up to our two other projects "How Big Is The Baby?" and "How Big Is A Planet?", we hope you take a look at these other projects and spread the word.

We have been playing with the ideas of scale in augmented reality for some time now, keep an eye out for more projects like this to come.

And as always, if you think we could be of service to you and your company, please contact us at "ar [at] talkingdogstudios [dot] com". And please go to howbigisthetv.com if you're thinking of shopping for a new TV!

Augmentedly yours,

The Talking Dog Team

Augmented Reality Watch

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ArXyFFr8n18

Hey, all you watch companies out there, here's a proof-of-concept video we made demonstrating a great new way to let your customers try on different watches in the comfort of their own homes. We've added a couple of enhancements to this that make it more than just your average AR: one, check out how the tag disappears, so it's easier for the customer to see how the watch will look with their clothing or on their bare wrist. And two, check out how the digital watch actually tells time! If you go to www.talkingdogstudios.com/ar/watch you can try it out for yourself: just use the left/right arrow keys on screen or on your keyboard to try out the different watches.

We'd love to see this used in a real retail application, where anybody with a webcam would be able to quickly try on a variety of watches, and where clicking on the "add to my shopping cart" button would take you to the website's store. Best of all, unlike many of the retail AR applications out there right now, there's no special software required to be downloaded because this all works in flash.

In the meantime, we hope everybody gets a kick out of playing with our augmented reality watch demonstration. Enjoy!

Rob Bryanton
Talking Dog AR
ar@talkingdogstudios.com