Let’s say you’re an architect and you have a great new building you’ve just finished designing and you want to show your client what the finished product will look like. In the past, the solution was either having a scale model built or rendering the blueprints into 3D models – but that’s so last year.
We live in the age of augmented reality (AR), so why not print up a massive AR marker and let your clients see how the building will look in a real-life view? That’s exactly what Brazilian developers Rossi Residencial did, and now they are in the Guinness Book of World Records for producing the world’s largest augmented reality experience.
Using a black and white AR marker measuring 9,668.11 square feet (roughly the size of the infield of a baseball field), the company superimposed a 3D model of its upcoming build project in real-time onto video of the area taken from a helicopter. Guinness adjudicators were on hand in the helicopter to make sure the computer was actually tracking the marker in real-time, and sure enough, it was. Check out the video below to see it in action!
For those unfamiliar with augmented reality, here’s how it works. The giant black and white canvas serves as a reference point for a computer that uses a camera input to survey the area. Based on the location, angle and tilt of the marker, the computer knows where the 2D planar surface of the earth is, and can thus superimposes the 3D model into the virtual space of the scene. And this is all done in real-time.
Technically speaking, the use of the black and white 2D marker to superimpose a 3D model into virtual space is nothing new for augmented reality – and the computer doing the work doesn’t know if the marker is 10,000 square feet or just a couple of square inches. The fun part of this experiment was its enormous size. To be honest, it would have been more impressive to get the computer to visually recognize the area without the marker, but hey, they can save that for their second act.
While this is pretty gimmicky, it’s still cool, and great exposure for augmented reality as a technology. Being in the Guinness Book means AR has finally “made it,” right? This enthusiast sure hopes so.
(Via Guinness World Records and Augmented Planet)
