Perplexing camera system links virtual and real world objects
Boffins at Sony’s London R&D division wowed attendees at GDC this week with a new breakthrough in augmented reality technology.
Known as Magnet, the AR software uses PS Vita’s camera to scan a real-world area and interpret what it sees in 3D. As the camera moves through an environment, it tracks multiple 'interest points' to build a picture of where certain objects are stationed.
The result is an Augmented Reality overlay that can position virtual objects in real world locations and, much like magnets, stick to that position.
"PS Vita is the only affordable portable device out there at the moment that has the power to do this,” said Diarmid Campbell, a programmer at the EyeToy R&D group.
Four videos demonstrating the tech, with comments by Campbell can be found below.
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The final video is of a live demonstration at GDC that left many attendees in the room impressed and perplexed by the new tech.
Now there are some amazing things that could be done with this gaming wise. And the technology will only get better, for example it could be used to automatically strip textures and normal maps from buildings and make it 100-times easier to create 3d models.
You could even use that feature to learn the texture of a building, then coming back to it later, and let's say it is obscured by a vehicle, we could use it to remove the vehicle and replace it with the existing texture.
This is very exciting stuff.
The real potential for this is to have it built into glasses with a camera in them. It's like virtual reality mixed with real life.
This is one of the most impressive things I've seen in a long time and it has massive applications in all sorts of things outside of games.
If they can get the overheads and footprint down on vita, there could be some very, very cool games come off the back of this, but it's uses in mapping and photography, especially on devices with higher resolutions (and as fast a frame-refresh) are just awesome. The fact this is running so well on a £200 handheld with a 0.3 megapixel camera is very encouraging.
It would be interesting to see what happens when something moves in front of the interest points or interest points overlap. Does the AR rendered stuff occlude? awesome stuff nonetheless.
.....and with those glasses, you could make people better looking in real life.! :)
