Augmented Reality

I did the above work 4 years ago for my Final Year Project in university. If for any reason the video fails to load, please use this direct link. Augmented reality deals with introducing virtual objects into real video sequence. I was working on a trading game prototype based on natural feature tracking (as opposed to marker tracking). The idea was to build a AR trading game, whereby when 2 trading cards was brought together, the virtual monsters on it will fight with each other. Trading cards will no longer be as boring as comparing the statistics printed on the card! Natural feature tracking works on natural feature (any kind of pictures/patterns), whereas marker tracking works on known shapes which is considerably easier to manage. My work uses a fair bit of computer vision and 3D geometry techniques, I shall spare you the details. ;) That FYP earns me an A+ and I was able to produce, according to my professor, the first real-time (30fps) natural feature tracking with considerably stable result in the world! (Consider, it was 4 years ago).

Weeks ago I come across this upcoming new video game for PS3 called 'The Eye of Judgement', and it looks very similar to what I was working on 4 years ago! And looking at the technology, it clearly is using marker tracking, and I bet I was producing a much more stable result than Sony - what is considered stable? The true aim of augmented reality is to make sure the introduced virtual objects will blend into its natural surrounding with perfectly. e.g. In this case, if the virtual objects were supposed to lie on a card, it should move together with the card and maintain its 3D pose. What makes this difficult is the real-time nature of the live camera, and the unpredictable movement of the cards. And I am really not surprise that this is still a working title. It will take sometime for them to perfect the marker tracking part, and make the virtual objects rendering stabilized.

If I were to continue developing into the prototype I was working on, I could be rich by now....only if. ;)