It seems like not even our blog is safe from iPhone related news. But one has to admit, it’s an interesting platform for developers with quite some innovative interface features packed into it. For us it’s exciting to see that one developer (Artoolworks) picked up one of our topics of interests: Augmented Reality. It seems that the processor and the built in graphics power allow interpretation of fiducials. Unfortunately the iPhone right now doesn’t sport a video processing capability, so the developed application only works with up to 12 frames per second. But hey, we are already waiting for iPhone 4G anyways, right?
When I first saw the ‘augmented sculpture’ at the ARS Electronica in 2007, I did the same thing as nearly everyone else did, who went in to this small room there. I immediately went out again and photographed the name of the artist from the board outside (Pablo Valbuena) with my mobile phone. Then I went in again and stayed there for a long long time.
Actually projections onto a 3D object in real space are nothing new at all, but we all know that holding a crayon doesnât make one necessary an artist. And Pablo is one of these people who are able to create an impressive piece of art just out of few minimalistic elements. The way he puts the virtual geometry on his physical sculpture is just amazing. The hypnotising sound environment and the perfectly choreographed virtual object transformation gave me the impression of being in a kind of a ‘Tron’ World.
I am happy that Pablo continued his work and hope to see some new versions of the ‘augmented sculpture’ in real ’space-time’ soon again!
Looking at a screen becomes way more interesting, if you actually can look behind it. There’s a couple of ways to track the position of someone’s face and point of view (easily done with infrared goggles as we know from here). But faceAPI allows the simple use of a webcam and the job is done.
