Tag: augmentedreality

UAV 3D capture

Yesterday autonomous drone manufacturer Skydio rolled out 3D Scan, an adaptive scanning software package that will greatly improve the workflow of those designing on top of existing spaces. They’re not marketing it that way, however; the rollout is aimed at the inspection industry, where large, complicated structures once had to be scaled by experienced climbers. With Skydio’s technology, you don’t even need a skilled drone pilot. Instead, you use their app to set boundaries around what structure(s) you would like captured, by dropping “pillars” around them. Then the drone’s software figures out the flight path it will automatically take, avoiding obstacles along the way. You choose the resolution, and the software figures out how many photos the drone will need to snap, tightening or loosening its flight path accordingly. The drone takes flight, and the model is generated in real time. You can then review the model on your device, on-site, in case you decide another pass is needed.

Minecraft Earth

That unlocks a class of experiences that have never been seen in a mobile AR game: coordinated actions that can happen only if multiple real people do things in the right order, standing in the exact right place. Like, say, an Adventure in which 4 people have to stand on pressure plates in the various corners of the space, thus triggering the reveal of a secret underground dungeon. You thought the Pokémon Go phenomenon of groups of people all pointing their phone in the same direction was weird? Wait until you see the Minecraft Earth version: half of them are spinning in a circle, 3 are squatting and making digging motions toward the ground, and a few others are all jumping around. Even better—they’re all talking about it. ”You can perfectly coordinate how to mine out an area or find hidden treasure if you’re with strangers, without talking, but social interaction around the common goal is a core part of what makes Minecraft Earth a different sort of multiplayer.”

AR Tabletop

Tilt5’s approach to AR is quite different from the others you’ve seen. The glasses require you place an inexpensive sheet of retroreflector on a surface (table, wall or stand) and it can display anything in 3D where that surface is. Real world objects can then be placed on the table and mix with the virtual ones. This may seem quite limiting, it doesn’t try to paint things on top of the arbitrary world like Magic Leap, but it has some big advantages because of this method:

AR Urbanism

What does the virtual space that “belongs to us” look like? Would could it look like? We might imagine a future as steeped in AR as Matsuda’s Hyperreality, but where instead of a hybrid landscape dominated by ads and obfuscating distractions, augmented overlays are used to highlight the hidden dimensions of place, or serve as a distinctly spatial platform for alternative forms of communication and culture. Inverting the vision of a commodified hybrid landscape, the seemingly inevitable barrage of immersive, interfacial capitalism could perhaps be transmuted into something democratic, artful, and even beautiful: a conduit to mobile urban discourse and learning; to collectively owned and managed hybrid spaces, and to community as a social body intersecting physical and digital worlds. But if this more hopeful image of an AR-saturated future is to come to fruition, it will require a deeply collaborative spirit between programmers and urbanists, artists and technologists, activists and educators — and most certainly architects as well.