As an example of how fast things are moving in AR consider augmented books. In 2008 I was blown away by “Haunted Book” by Camille Sherrer of ECAL and the ever amazing EPFL CV lab. I can’t seem to find a video of that work, but “Magic Book” by the same artist looks similar:
This ran on a laptop, and the graphics are strictly flat sprites. The natural feature tracking was ground-breaking in 2008 - even recent commercial works such as the rather nice DibiDogs book prefer markers.
The augmentations on the laptop / book in hands dichotomy makes for awkward interaction, and should recognized for what it is: a limitation imposed by incapable mobile devices, rather than a design decision (though the kids are clearly unfased).
Three years on from “Haunted Book”, Helen Papagiannis has a new augmented pop-up book, with interactive fully 3D models, natural feature tracking running on iOS mobile devices.
The tracking isn’t a research project either, but off-the-shelf from Metaio. It feels like the technology is just maturing to the point where artists and creators can get on with what they do without the technology being a massive consideration, or getting in the way too much.
As with most technologies, the mechanisms for reading and consuming are maturing faster than those for writing and creating. The next challenge is to make creating AR works as easy as consuming this piece. Maybe we’ll be there when we have an AR sketch book (if that even makes any sense).
I have a copy of the DibiDogs book, and I hope I can get a copy of “Who’s afraid of Bugs” shipped to Finland. I’m waiting to try them out on my friends’ tech-addled kids, who weren’t even born when I first saw “Haunted Book” back in 2008.
