This is a crazy fun demo of the new Avatar toys by Mattel. Each toy includes a little card that is scannable via webcam and creates an on-screen augmented reality robot or character. While this is old hat for most of us, Mattel is quite proud of being ahead of the curve and for good reason. You can see more demos at AvatarItag.com.
Total Immersion made the technology and even added a little “button” system to the cards. When you touch a spot on the card, the onscreen character pulls a knife, shoots a gun, or recounts part of the story. The added information and data will change over time, up to the release of the movie on December 18.
Obviously this requires a computer and a patient kid but it’s still an exciting addition to an already interesting movie.
We’ll have some of these toys in next week and we’ll stage mock battles for you all. Wouldn’t it be cool if you could put two cards on the table at once and have them fight? OMG!
*raises BS flag.
Why BS? Didn’t GE recently do something just like this?
“BS” = if that’s real it’s friggin awesome, but i’m too ignorant of current technology to know that it is totally doable and real
It’s actually pretty easy to do. You can even do something comparable without the need for extra software. Just a webcam and flash will do.
Do a YouTube search for “Flash augmented reality” for all sorts of examples. There’s an ActionScript library called FLARToolKit (FLash Augmented Reality ToolKit) that does all the heavy lifting making it really easy to implement.
Also Adobe is hosting a sneak peak of Avatar at their upcoming conference next week Adobe MAX. So I imagine that this is done with Flash and we will be hearing more about this from the conference.
We’ve seen I-TAG like implementations before with cars, I believe the first was Honda or Toyota. I’ll see if I can pick one up today at the Long Beach Comic Con. FLARToolKit has come a long way considering the tremendous amount of had coding that had to be done in the past to achieve this level of 3D control and one can see how dependent it is on processing power to achieve real time response.
It looks awesome…you hater
Is this the same thing that was done with those baseball cards before?
For some reason, the phrase “Let the Wookie win.” popped in my head.
I like this practical application of Augmented Reality. http://ow.ly/srIY
Here’s an AR game in which the characters actually fight:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SU-1FJHU3ZE&feature=related
Here’s some more info about interesting AR projects:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/click_online/8226777.stm
I didn’t think this would be cool until I watched the video. It’s like holding on to an object in a dream but this time being able to wake up and still see it.
The PS3 has a similar one, only that with a little hairy animal.
Well it looks pretty cool to me. But I wonder how much it will cost? Coming out around christmas I guess they will be able to bump up the price a bit.
Incredible tech. I think we are going to see the augmented reality space really take off this year (lead by the 3GS and compass).
Great work Mattel!
Nicholas Negroponte may not have produced the $100 laptop yet but MIT Media Lab helped lay the ground for this http://web.media.mit.edu/~nicholas/Wired/WIRED6-03.html
I’m just waiting for a Yugiho AR game and then all will be good
AR is the future of human-computer interaction. We are already seeing mobile devices use AR to enhance the user experience.
Given the ease of use offered by AR interaction, machine recognition of human voice, gestures and even thought is inevitable.
The film “Minority Report” and Vernor Vinge’s book “Rainbow’s End” offer glimpses of possible futures.
The king of ARG is Jordan Weisman. He’s the original. He’s got a new start-up with a crazy amount of funding but for some reason Techcrunch doesn’t cover it? Check them out for yourself – Smith & Tinker
I went out and picked up a set of these today to try them out.
They suck. I couldn’t get them to work on multiple machines or multiple browsers. Next step is to call the help line, but really? I wanted to see the tech work, oh well.
the PS3s game eye of judgment – has being doing this exact same thing for about a yr now
more toys for the boys
The PlayStation 3 has been doing things like this for a while now with the PlayStation Eye. Games like Eye of Judgement for example.
Matel is not “ahead of the curve” on anything.