Augmented Reality

]If you've watched television at all in the last few months, you've probably seen the recent GE commercials for Smart Grid technology.

Most prevalent of these commercials is the one that originally aired during the Super Bowl, featuring an animated scarecrow made of electrical components longing for a brain. Despite my affection for that old black-and-white turned technicolor classic, another of the Smart Grid commercials is even better, in my opinion.

The commercial I'm referring to shows a guy sitting in front of his webcam holding up a piece of paper that magically morphs into a virtual diorama, complete with spinning wind turbine. The commercial encourages you to visit the GE ecomagination website to try it for yourself. For those of you with a webcam, you should definitely check it out - trust me, it's cool! If you blow into the microphone on your computer, the wind turbine even spins faster.

The technology used on the website (technically mislabeled as a "digital hologram") is that of augmented reality. While research has been done on this offshoot of virtual reality since the 90s, we've only been seeing augmented reality pop up in popular culture in the past few years. Perhaps the most common use of the technology is the yellow "1st down" line used on television broadcasts of football games. But much more complicated applications are starting to crop up.

Here's a brief rundown of how the ecomagination AR works. First, the camera picks up the "fiduciary marker" that you print out and hold up in front of your camera. Then the computer uses this marker as a 3-dimensional point of reference and reconstructs the wind turbine animation using this frame of reference. Finally, the turbine animation is integrated with the images of your surroundings from the camera, and the integrated "augmented reality" is displayed on your screen.

As display technology advances (think HUDs or those interactive coffee tables), I expect the use of augmented reality technology will also expand. The possible applications of AR are pretty exciting - not just for advertising and 1st down lines, but for navigation, architecture, gaming, medicine, or education.

Augmented reality... just another example of GE being ahead of the curve!

Comments

[Pan]

Hello,

Can you explain a little more about how does the blowing motion actually cause the fan to spin. Is the camera picking the lips position when blowing as a marker?

Please give me an email if you know.

Thanks,
Pan

[Randy Askin]

Pan,

Thanks for the question. From what I could tell, the turbine spins faster as you blow into the microphone - so that particular aspect is dependent on the sound level coming into the microphone rather than any image input or markers from the webcam.

Randy