sn0wcrash :: [micro]blog

By this point, we're all familiar with augmented reality, but Swedish mobile software firm The Astonishing Tribe is taking information overload to the next logical step: augmented identity. Mashing up face recognition technology, computer vision, cloud computing, and augmented reality with the complex digital lives many of us lead on the Internet, TAT has created an app that allows you to gather information on a person and their social networking life simply by pointing your camera phone at their face.

Dubbed Recognizr, the app essentially works like this: the user points the camera at a person across the room. Face recognition software creates a 3-D model of the person's mug and sends it across a server where it's matched with an identity in the database. A cloud server conducts the facial recognition since and sends back the subject's name as well as links to any social networking sites the person has provided access to.

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Wii wand not cutting it for you anymore? A group of game designers at the National University of Singapore have developed a next-gen immersive gaming system that blends virtual reality and augmented reality with the physical environment. Wearing head-mounted displays and using other peripherals, players use the open space around them to move, jump, crouch and aim within a game, collecting virtual objects and fighting opponents real and virtual along the way.

The group created a few variations of the same first-person shooter (FPS), one of which works through virtual reality, another through augmented reality. In the virtual reality orientation, the players wear head-mounted displays and control either a sword or gun in the game using a peripheral wand. A system of sensors tracks the head display – which projects images of the in-game scenes in front of the players’ eyes – as well as the wand, giving players real time feedback on the virtual environment. Players can move around the game by physically moving about the room (which more or less needs to be obstacle free), picking up virtual objects and engaging in virtual duels and shootouts by actively aiming, ducking and maneuvering.

But while virtual reality is undeniably awesome next to the usual keyboard or paddle-controlled FPS, the augmented reality variation takes it to the next level, letting gamers play in any open environment. In this setup, players wear an augmented reality headset with a camera looking forward that captures the users’ real-world views. The game engine then syncs the real-world environment with game data, so players can run, jump and hide within the real world environment while shooting, slashing and otherwise racking up points.

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