Welcome to another infrequent edition of the ARToolKit newsletter. This is
just to keep you up to date with some of the developments with ARToolKit
and it's applications. In this edition you'll find news about the
following:
*MagicPaddle wins Laval Virtual Grand Jury Prize !
*VR Dig at the Seattle Art Museum
*ARToolKit at the Boston CyberArts Festival
*ARToolKit version 2.40 released
*MagicBook Article Appears in IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications
*AR tutorial at SIGGRAPH 2001
*New Windows version of ARToolKit
If you have any ARToolKit applications or news that you'd like to get to
the ARToolKit community please let me know and I'll put it in the next
newsletter..
Anyway - on with the show..
Mark
*MagicPaddle wins Laval Virtual Grand Jury Prize !
The MagicPaddle ARToolKit application developed by Dr. Hirokazu Kato and
his students at Hiroshima City University has won the prestigious Grand
Jury Trophy of the Laval Virtual 2001 conference. The MagicPaddle
application was awarded this trophy after winning the Laval Virtual trophy
for the best Virtual Reality Engineering, Industrial Design and Simulation
application. The MagicPaddle was judged by the jury to be the best VR
application among 10 other trophy winners.
The MagicPaddle application was first shown at the ISAR 2000 conference in
Munich, Germany. It is an application that uses ARToolKit to track the
motions of a real paddle, enabling the user to select and arrange virtual
furniture in a virtual room. Using Tangible Augmented Reality principles,
the user can select, move and delete virtual objects by placing, moving,
tilting and shaking the real paddle. The interface is so intuitive that
even complete computer novices can engage in 3D design.
You can read about the MagicPaddle interface or download a video of it
in action at:
http://www.hitl.washington.edu/people/grof/SharedSpace/Download/Oct5news.html
Laval Virtual is an International Virtual Reality conference that was held
in Mayanne, France, from May 16th to 20th. The conference attracts over 70
exhibiting companies from 17 countries and nearly 10,000 attendees.
You can read more about this award and the Laval Virtual conference at
http://www.laval-virtual.org/html/news/infos.php?id=9
Congratulations Hiro !
*VR Dig at the Seattle Art Museum
On May 10th the Seattle Art Museum opened it's "Treasures of Ancient
China" exhibit. This is a $5 million exhibit with some amazing bronze
artifacts that were discovered in the Sichuan region of China. Some of the
pieces are more than 3,000 years old and they include the oldest
life-sized bronze figure in the world. This is the first time that these
pieces have been taken out of China so it's truely a remarkable show.
The Seattle Art Museum wanted to make the show more interactive than
normal, so they have been collaborating with the HIT Lab for the past year
on a Virtual Reality Dig. The goal was to give people the experience of
discovering the artifacts for themselves, so they could appreciate what it
was like for the archeologists who uncovered the pieces. They also wanted
people to pick up and hold virtual models instead of just seeing the
artifacts in glass cases.
Originally the museum wanted to develop an AR experience that could be
used by 30-40 people at a time, each with their own headmounted displays.
However when they found out the cost of 50 Sony Glasstron SVGA displays
they quickly changed their minds !
The final exhibit used ceiling mounted cameras and a projection table and
wall screen. Using a modified version of ARToolKit the cameras tracker
real shovels held by the users, enabling a 3D virtual model of the shovels
to be shown on the wall projection screen. Participants can use the real
shovels to pick out virtual models of the artifacts from a virtual pit and
interact with the models, by putting the broken artifacts together and
trying to solve the mystery of why they were buried as they were.
Some of the technical challenges that had to be solved were using
ARToolKit in a dimmly lit environment, getting robust tracking when the
tracking markers were a long way from the cameras, and developing a robust
VR application that could be used by people of all ages and experience
levels.
Since the beginning of May hundreds of people have tried the Virtual Dig
and the response has been overwelmingly positive, espescially from
classrooms of school children that are brought through. You can read more
about the exhibit and see pictures at:
http://www.hitl.washington.edu/people/grof/SharedSpace/Download/Projects/SAM/
The exhibit will be running from May 10th until August 12th, so please
stop by if you happen to be visiting Seattle during that time. After
closing in Seattle the exhibit will be travelling over the next 18 months
to Houston, Ontario and the Metropolitan Musuem of Art in New York. It
looks like at least one of these museums will also be taking the Virtual
Dig experience. To view some of the artifacts, and for more information
about the exhibit please visit:
http://www.seattleartmuseum.org/exhibitions/sichuan/default.htm
*ARToolKit at the Boston CyberArts Festival
Continuing with the Art theme..
Bruce Campbell, and Duff Hendrickson from the Human Interface Technology
laboratory at the University of Washington have just returned from
demonstrating an artistic application of ARToolKit at the Boston CyberArts
Festival. Held between April 21st and May 6th, Boston CyberArts is a
yearly festival that shows the work of dozens of electronic artist.
Bruce was invited to attend and demonstrate his Flora application. This is
an application of ARToolKit that allows users to view and breed flowers in
an Augmented Reality setting. When looking through a handheld display
users can see virtual flowers on ARToolKit tracking cards. Each of these
flowers is a VRML file dynamically created by L-system software that
interprets a genome string. When two flowers are placed side by side,
genetic algorithm techniques are used to create a new genome and a new
flower is grown that contains characteristics of both it's parents. Using
ARToolKit people can easily breed dozens of flowers until they create the
virtual flower they are most pleased with. Not only is this an compelling
artistic experience, but also provides a good education in genetic
principles.
This engaging software was tried by more than 700 people during the course
of the festival and was seen by thousands more. For images from the
Festival and more information, see:
http://www.hitl.washington.edu/people/bdc/ie543/ie543paper.htm
For more information about Boston CyberArts please visit:
http://www.bostoncyberarts.org/
*ARToolKit version 2.40 released
A new version of ARToolKit has been released. Version 2.40 differs from
the previous version 2.33 in two ways:
*Improved tracking accuracy
*Improved control over performance
Read more about these changes at:
http://www.hitl.washington.edu/people/grof/SharedSpace/Download/Doc/art240.html
The 2.40 library is available for download now at:
http://www.hitl.washington.edu/people/grof/SharedSpace/Download/ARToolKit2.40.tar.gz
*MagicBook Article Appears in IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications
A brief article about the MagicBook application has appeared in the
May/June issue of IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications. The MagicBook
interface was shown at Siggraph 2000 and uses ARToolKit to seamless
transition people between Reality and Immersive Virtual Reality.
You can find out more by reading the article at:
http://www.computer.org/cga/
or
http://www.hitl.washington.edu/research/shared_space/download/papers/cgaMay2001.pdf
or by visiting the MagicBook website at:
http://www.hitl.washington.edu/magicbook/
*AR tutorial at SIGGRAPH 2001
Dr. Hirokazu Kato will teach a session on how to develop ARToolKit
applications as part of a full day tutorial in Augmented Reality at
SIGGRAPH 2001. Titled "Augmented Reality; The Interface is Everywhere" the
tutorial is the first time a course devoted entirely to Augmented Reality
has been presented at SIGGRAPH. Taught by six leading AR researchers, the
course will provide an overview of AR Technologies, guidelines for
developing applications and a hands-on demo session. Each of the course
attendees will receive a copy of ARToolKit 2.40 as well as over 400 pages
of course notes and paper reprints.
For more information, please see the SIGGRAPH 2001 tutorials website:
http://helios.siggraph.org/s2001/conference/courses/crs27.html
*New Windows version of ARToolKit
We are still trying to get a optimized version of ARToolKit for the
Windows platform. Although we haven't made much progress on a DirectShow
version of the software, we have produced an updated version of the
ARToolKit 2.11 library for Windows. The function calls are the same, but
video texturing and other performance enhancing features have been added
to improve the frame rate on a Windows platform. This verison has
proven to be particularly useful for people who want to get ARToolKit
working on a laptop or wearable computer with USB camera input. You can
download your copy from:
http://www.hitl.washington.edu/people/grof/SharedSpace/Download/art.zip
But be warned - it's a HUGE 23 mb download because it includes all of the
Visual Sudio files and libraries need to compile and run the applications.
We'll put a lean version up as soon as we're happy with the windows code.
We still need help with producing an optimized MFC version of ARToolKit
that uses the DirectShow libraries for video capture. Please email me if
you have the time to work on this. We are also interested in getting
Firewire support working on both the Windows and Linux platforms.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Mark Billinghurst | Human Interface Technology Laboratory
grof@h .................. | University of Washington, Box 352-142
fax: +1-206-543-5380 | Seattle, WA 98195
|