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Back from Hack Day London - it was absolutely incredible! I had really great fun, did a lot of hacking/coding all night long!

I worked with Jon Hare, and we went for the augmented reality web service, which was pretty crazy. We made the ARToolKit, which you can see in the video below, into a web service!

Although it’s a little rough around the edges still, you can play with our hack online at: http://multimedia.ecs.soton.ac.uk/artheworld

I’ve also posted the slides from our 90 seconds presentation on Slideshare:

For my PhD I had loads of fun with tangible augmented reality interfaces. I posted a couple of videos on my work onto Google Video a few weeks back, which shows the kinds of things I ended up doing:

This work was done using the ARToolKit, an augmented reality toolkit that does the computer vision tracking of the marker cards you can see in the video.

I’m very tempted to build something based on this for Hack day!

In collaboration with a couple of guys from the research lab I work at, we recently had the crazy idea to make the ARToolkit into a web service.

The basic idea is as follows: you take a photo of an ARToolKit marker in a fun place, upload it to the web service and it renders some 3D content over the card using the ARToolKit.

I started putting together a basic web app using the Ruby Camping framework. I even managed to get it to upload result to Flickr if the user decided they liked the resulting image.

Here’s a screenshot of what we have so far, plus the Flickr account for the service.

The app still needs a lot of work (e.g. letting people choose which 3D model they want rendered), but the basics are there for a nice hack.

What we really need to do is work out an actual application/scenario for this - there probably isn’t one and it’s just a bit of fun, pointless hackery. But I’m quite intrigued to investigate some kind of whacky “physical meets the digital” experiment…