Thinking about the cold winter this year, the last week of January warms memories about the first European Augmented Reality Winter School, which brought exceptionally sunny days to Oxford Brookes University. The Performance Augmentation Lab in collaboration with DAQRI gathered students from all over the world to learn about the latest innovations in augmented reality.
Talks
- Dr Fridolin Wild, Director of the Performance Augmentation Lab and Senior Research Fellow at Oxford Brookes University, introduced to the topic and provided an overview of the history and the state of the art in augmented reality.
- John Twycross, Senior Lecturer in Digital Media Production at the Oxford Brookes University, spoke about the Unity game engine as a key target platform for rapid development of augmented reality applications.
- On the more practical side of augmented reality, Philip Lamb, Chief Open Source Architect from DAQRI, presented a talk on theoretical and practical introduction to the latest version of ARToolKit being developed by DAQRI. With his colleagues Thorsten Bux and Dan Bell he gave an intro to history, purpose, functionality, architecture, build system and introduced to basic use of ARToolKit 6 in Unity3D.
- Other Winter School talks were about short-term and long-term research directions (Carl Smith), including insights into possibilities for experience capturing.
- Students learned how to define common patterns for better communication in augmented reality on the session dedicated to perception, user interface design and storytelling (Alla Vovk).
- A session on spatial understanding in Unity (Will Guest) provided an introduction to dynamic surface meshes and interaction with geometry.
- Advanced technology topics were covered in special lectures, including:
- native development for mobiles running on Android and iOS (Phil Lamb, Thorsten Bux),
- development for the DAQRI Smart Helmet (Wally Young, note: the original slide deck unfortunately cannot be shared, so the link goes to an info sheet about the helmet),
- web-based AR with JSARToolKit and Three.JS (Jerome Etienne: slides, source code),
- a dedicated lecture about ARTvision: the ARToolKit Computer Vision Tracker (Dan Bell),
- and a dedicated session about camera calibration (Thorsten Bux).
- The winter school was rounded up by an outlook on ARToolKit’s future, provided by Phil Lamb.
Demos
The Winter School came certainly to life at Demo Session where students presented their applications had developed during the 5-day school. There were presentations on experience capturing API (based on ECO repository) taking smart glasses sensor data into account, transfer mechanisms realizable with smart glasses alone and with additional sensor data. The winning team developed an application that allows users to experience “fire skin” — an augmented skin layer that behaves like a flame during the workout. There were also demos about interactive augmented maps, holographic personal cards and augmented sound space.
Winter School students and lecturers after the closing notes
Great week with excellent speakers and awesome people 🙂
Thanks to Fridolin and the DAQRI-guys for organising this event!