Remember those Lego kiosks that show off what’s inside a Lego box with a 3D rendering? The company behind those displays has a lot more in store. Or rather, planned for your mobile phone. metaio launched an iPhone browser a couple months back called junaio that’s designed to provide augmented reality features whenever you look through an iPhone camera lens. (The company has a developer contest going on now.) This week, metaio also launched its Android version of the browser in closed beta for developers. And the new release includes something metaio describes as natural feature tracking. Like the Lego kiosks, this new feature allows users to look at certain images and see them rendered in 3D. Words don’t do it justice, however. Take a look at the video demo embedded above to see just how cool this application is.
From the metaio press release:
Peter Meier, the CTO sees junaio on its way to becoming an “augmented reality experience platform”. junaio provides unique features, which emphasize AR`s capabilities to provide fascinating user experiences. Because Android allows access to analyze the videostream, the Android version will be the first free and open mobile platform to provide natural feature tracking to the developer community. “We expect these capabilities to revolutionize outdoor or print advertising, packaging and mobile gaming”, says Peter Meier.
So, if I understand this right, the dino can “see” its surroundings and react to changes in its environment like a virtual robot.
Not that sophisticated, at least as I understand it. The software allows you to view a coded image as a 3D object. The 3D object may also include pre-programmed motion – almost like a 3D version of an animated gif. (Hi, Dad! :))
In the video, when he stops turning the board the 3D image also stops turning. It is almosst like the robot at:
Pretty Cool – I see advertisers jumping on this while it is still in kewl phase, then there will be a push to make it do cooler things to keep people interested and then a decent game will finally emerge and everyone else will copy it a hundred times.
If you can take a still picture of it then it could be a fun scavenegr hunt as well.