UKC

Good morning UKC'ers

The other day I noticed my google Pixel was inviting me to try something called AR stickers.

I gave it a go and found that I can place virtual reality type objects around the place and view them with my phone.

I started just playing with the fun Star Wars stickers and then the food emoji and stranger things characters.    Pretty fun stuff .

Anyway I started researching all the other apps that allow this and came across BBC Civilisations and the JPL Spacecraft apps that do this too. 

These apps are great and I can see loads of potential for learning and teaching.   

I'd love to see models of famous architecture/ locations and engineering models in this format.

Just think even famous climbs might eventually come to this format.    Although I think that will count as beta.

Some quick demo pictures

https://ibb.co/album/eiXHrF

Enjoy 

TWS

I wrote a report on such uses of AR 21 years ago...

So you mean a sci-fi story then ???

You visionary   

People were sticking VR and AR glasses to thier heads longer before 20 years ago.  Head up display technology was first tried in the 1940s, and helmet mounted displays date back to the 1960s.

Every decade or so there’s a resurgence of interest in the field as a consumer product; the big difference is that the tech really is “good enough” at a civilian price point this time around, and it’s here to stay.

Yup and only get better and better.     

I've shown a few teachers at work and they love the possible applications.    

I've downloaded a app this afternoon that allows me to scan in my own models and use them .   It's a bit fiddly but still very very impressive .

The big missing ingredient - that’s surprisingly hard to do - is something to selectively remove light entering the eyes that comes from the environment, so as to create darker patches, either as an end or as a base for drawing on.  That’s going to be a really tough nut to crack.

Last year, the Forrestry Commission had an AR Gruffalo trail for kiddies in some of it's sites. Download app on smart phone/tablet, wander round the trail and point it at the markers and you got the Gruffalo characters coming to life in the forest.

The really neat thing was it interfaced with the camera, so you could take a pic through the app of your kids with the characters.

https://www.forestry.gov.uk/gruffalomarker

Did it say it would never catch on?

no, that was my o' level physics teacher back in 1971 who told me off for having the "silly idea" that the obvious solution to deficiencies in electric vehicle performance for everyday use was to make use of the various stuff he'd told us about previously to have a car that used electricity for cruising and petrol/diesel for starting/accelerating, using magnetic braking to make use of the energy lost in braking to put power back in the battery etc.   How could I have been so silly to think it could ever be made to work?

Perhaps that was why I decided to do Arts A levels ...

No; this was at a time when all major military nations were investigating 'future soldier systems'. The DoD were spending tens of millions on microdisplays alone, to support their 'Land Warrior' programme. We didn't have the same budget, so my report stressed that we ought to be looking at what information should be presented, and how to present it to best improve situational awareness. I proposed a research programme to do just that. My proposed hardware development platform was pretty prescient, though... This wasn't the direction the consortium wanted to take, so we were dropped from the consortium...

VR and AR technology was very much in existence then.

There is a science fiction link, though; I suggested that we look at SF for examples of VR/AR presentation, as not all fiction is implausible...

 This led to a very annoying change of direction for the manufacture of a micro display I was using to make very basic computer generated holograms almost 20 years ago.  They decided to ditch interesting science devices and to go all out on micro displays for the military. 

There is a very annoying pattern with both display and sensor technology where a very interesting device is made by a new firm, which is then bought up for staff/IP etc to either produce military or consumer devices and that’s the end of the interesting stuff.

Which one?

'Interesting research' of this nature is usually intended to lead to a product; that's what the venture capitalists are after...

Displaytech FLCs.  Last time I saw them they were being used with sequential RGB illumination for full colour micro display.

For sure, but there are all sorts of niche scientific applications for these devices as well...  

My careers "advice" person / teacher, who told me in 1978, "computers are a fad and in a couple of years time when the fad has died out, there'll be loads of people with computer qualifications and no jobs for them."

I can see that it's a problem but is it actually a major one? It strikes me as similar to displaying black or dark colours on a projector. A projector can't make the white screen any darker than the ambient lighting but by contrast with other parts of the image it can easily fool the eye into seeing black.

Can't you achieve the same with AR glasses? I guess you do have the extra difficulty of variable backgrounds rather than a consistent screen.

am I right in thinking that I'd have to attach my phone to my face to realise the benefit of AR beta? I don't think that is going to happen now ..... do you? 

sounds like a solution looking for a problem. For the time being at least my eyes work fine.

'Interesting research' has a tendency to ride into the Valley of Death in the defence environment, especially in the UK since some bright spark in the MOD about 15 years ago coined the phrase 'real tangible benefit from research' and gave a timescale for that benefit of 3-5 years. 

Given that LCDs started with someone who noticed an 'interesting property' when a current was applied to a certain material, and got more and more funding for years to investigate those properties without any idea of what they might lead to, that's pretty short sighted.

Research and development are different, but related disciplines. Industrial R&D is usually very much toward the development end, with universities dealing more with the 'pure research' stuff. Short-sighted or not, investors want return on their capital. Without it, they can't fund further work.

I've spent my career on the cusp of R&D. Apart from GSM, very little of what I have done has ended up in products. GSM was interesting, because we went from advanced development, through specification development, to creating silicon exploiting new modulation and error correction techniques, and cell planning tools.

that would be why they were still running Manpower Services training in typewriter repair in to the 80s

To many people’s surprise it is.  I had a similar conversation about the same basic problem on here with “Tom in Edinburgh” a few weeks back.  Actually blocking light out from a far object in a plane very near the eye is difficult because the light is totally defocoused as it enters the light - light from any individual point on the object passes through every point in the plane in front of the eye.  If you try and block a distant tree out with a pin in front of your eye the pin will either be invisible or very fuzzy.

Aside: A projector screen that is black at all but three narrow wavelength bands matched to an RGB laser projector can look almost pitch black but have vibrant colour.  Not currently very affordable.

It’s an interesting idea - I’ve not used current generation head mounted AR, but I suspect any “boosted” image of the environment would be far from seamless and would be quite a trippy experience.  I’d love to try such a device actually.  If a camera>display system was good enough to “boost” environmental background light, it would be good enough to fully replace it meaning the overlay could be done in pure software.

Probably true, what's even more galling is the fact, programming was one of the things that came quite naturally to me, but by the time I found that out it was a little late to break in to jobs. Strangely though, I was offered a job with the CEGB (remember them?) ended up serving my time as a Plumber / Welder, but ended up in Electrical engineering, writing code, amongst other things.

It's a funny old world.