Singularity Hub

Somewhere between the harshness of reality and the fantasy of virtual reality lies the domain of Augmented Reality (AR). The French company Total Immersion’s AR technology uses camera capture and 3D imaging techniques to blend surrounding and simulated environments in real-time. You’ve probably seen the videos floating around You Tube — people hold simple pieces of paper up to their web cameras and suddenly cool cars or a baseball player appear on the screen, seemingly right on top of the paper. The mash of real and virtual gives the illusion that both are occurring in the same space. One look at these stunning effects and you have a hard time believing it’s real, which it isn’t, and you can’t help wanting to learn more. If you haven’t seen the videos already, check out what you’re missing below:

AR videos have been making the rounds on the Internet recently in part due to their nearly seamless blending of the captured and constructed images. Without this real-time blending, Augmented Reality would be completely redundant with the CGI movies that have been coming out of Hollywood for years. With the real-time blending, Total Immersion has opened the door for interaction between the audience and virtual environment. That interactive ability is what will transform AR from a novelty to a world-wide phenomenon.

Augmented Reality from Total Immersion works on a simple concept: blend captured video and artificial 3D objects in real-time.

Some companies are predisposed to benefit from the AR technology.

Collectible trading card games and sports memorabilia have jumped at the chance for interactive collectibles. Topps (the baseball card giant) launched AR products in March, shown in this demonstration video:

The Reality of the Situation

In the short term, AR will primarily be seen in two venues: interactive marketing and extended-content media. Interactive marketing has already proven useful: Focus Feature’s stop motion movie Coraline used an advertising campaign (in selected cities) where people on the street could see themselves with button eyes. General Electric’s new web campaign, plug into the smart grid, allows users to explore their new energy solutions using AR. Extended-content media will encompass all the books, DVD cases, and other merchandise that will boost sales by including interactive AR portions. Already, Total Immersion is working with childrens’ books publishers to create products that can either be read as normal books or read along side the computer for interactive stories.

Total Immersion has developed marker-less tracking for its camera capture software. This means that any object (not just specially tagged objects) can be viewed and augmented. In the future, your mobile phone could take a picture of any object and provide information or overlapping video as you desire. Already, advertising applications are being implemented so that you can take a snapshot of a product you see and have its purchasing information appear instantly on your mobile device.

Total Immersion and AR will soon bring you the next level of Pokemon and collectible card games.

In the long term, AR is a solid step to closing the gap between watching and experiencing content. Already Total Immersion has teamed up with Futuroscope (a French amusement park) and created an interactive attraction that projects artificial zoos right before your eyes. The next step will be to take the technology out of the entertainment industry and into the information age. Imagine wearing special glasses that show the height, weight, and costs of objects you see. Or, you could sit in a car and have hazards highlighted on your windshield and maps appear on the road ahead of you. As cameras become smaller and clearer, your biological eyes could be enhanced with AR images and informatics. Military applications for AR are plentiful: assisted aiming, tactical information on targets, comparing faces to known-combatant lists, etc.

All this potential from a company that is not quite 10 years old. Starting in 1999, founders Bruno Uzzan and Valentin Lefevre developed AR from an idea into a successful international company. And they continue to grow, with a new office in Los Angeles. For those who doubt that Total Immersion and AR will extend beyond a mere novelty, let me point out that some of the first applications for AR were in model design and simulation for BMW and GM. While Total Immersion may have come to your attention for its cool videos and customer interactivity “wow” factor, its future is likely to be much more impressive. AR is going to make our world a little less real and a lot more virtual.

Robots can climb stairs, and they are doing it everywhere you look. “No big deal” you say, but it really is a big deal. Five to ten years ago almost nobody was doing it. Now grad students are doing it all by themselves for thesis projects.

Stair climbing may not seem like it is that hard, but it really is hard, especially if you don’t take the easy way out by using a tracked system. Stair climbing only looks easy because we are building on the knowledge that those before us have so painstakingly accumulated. This is a common theme with technological advancement: things that once seemed hard (and really were hard!) often appear easy once we figure out how to do them and they become commonplace.

One of our favorite stair climbing robots is the appropriately named stairbot. Not only is the stairbot pretty awesome, but it is accompanied by an excellent website that offers a nice look at the engineering theory behind stair climbing robots. The stairbot can drive back and forth, pivot and turn, drive over small obstacles up to 4 cm high, and yes, go up and down stairs. Lets take a look at the stairbot in action:

One of the techniques that is key to the stairbot’s success is its spindle driven ability to dynamically change its length. In order to navigate stairs both upwards and downwards, the stairbot is equiped with several sensors that allow it to sense its orientation and then make the necessary adjustments.

Below is a frontal view of the stairbot in all of its beauty, sensors and all!

Perhaps the easiest and most common technique for getting robots up stairs it to equip them with tracks, similar to your typical army tank. The tracked technique may require less skill and precision than other techniques, but still it gets the job done. Below is a video of the B2P2 robot, an Unmanned Ground Vehicle (UVG) initiative developed at the University of Angers in France. Also below is a video of the versatile army robot from iRobot, called the Packbot, which also uses tracks. There are several other tracked robots that go up stairs - these are only two such examples:

Of course one of the harder challenges in stair climbing is the humanoid variety. The famous Asimo robot from Honda conquered the task many years ago, as did the HRP-2 line of robots. Lets look at videos of the Asimo robot, first succeeding at stair climbing, and then in the second video failing. The video with the robot falling is quite hilarious so laugh all you want…but keep in mind that robots are likely to have the last laugh!

Finally, we end our survey of stair climbing robots with a short video of a robot developed at the department of Mechanical Engineering and Mechatronics, Ariel University Center, Israel. We don’t have much information on the robot, but you have to admit the climbing technique is quite interesting and novel:

Stair climbing, a difficult challenge by itself, is just one of a long series of major challenges that robots can now perform quite easily, yet nobody seems to notice. Go ask the general public about the progress robots have made in the last ten years and most people will say “not much”. Even though we are bombarded by small, specific signs of progress everyday, it is hard for us to step back and see the big picture.

Take a moment to step back, however, and the robotic revolution is all around us! Robots are in fact advancing at an incredible pace, and they are not simply replicating human abilities - they are building upon them and extending them. Humans can only climb stairs using their feet. Robots can climb stairs using feet, but they can also do it with tracks, wheels, shifting appendages, and more.

Moving beyond stairs for a moment, robots like Big Dog show us that robots can handle just about any terrain imaginable. The future certainly looks bright for robots. Lets hope that translates into an equally bright future for humans too.

Over at Hacker News there was a discussion about our ebay genome story that I thought was cool enough to post below. In the first part of the thread user davidmathers is talking about the cost to sequence an entire human genome (which we have written about many times). As user Femur later points out, there are obviously many such trends, which of course is a foundational aspect of Kurzweil’s works. Do you know of similar trends that are your favorites? Let us know in the comments. Just to break the ice, I will go first. Check the comments!