Augmented Reality

Just reading Ollie Bray's musings about Augmented Reality and its emergence as a gaming technology. I've been working on this over the summer looking at ways that it could be harnessed for educational purposes and discovering some interesting history - like that the BBC released a set of AR story books as part of their Jam program which has now disappeared off the face of the digital Earth (anyone who's still got a copy PLEASE get in touch!!).
I have been surprised actually how easy it is to develop using AR and how many different software frameworks there are out there for developing resources. One particularly interesting discovery was the integration of the ARTag library with vvvv, a visual programming language. From having no previous knowledge, I was quite quickly (within 1-2 hours) able to put together a 'patch' (like a program in vvvv) which took a camera input and detected an AR tag within the video stream, reporting its 3D orientation in realtime.
ARTag itself has numerous applications as a standalone tool just by using the demo apps - I showed it to some colleagues in the office (set it up in 15 mins flat) which elicited the comment "It's like magic!", and it really is magical to see in action. A search on YouTube will yield numerous demos of AR applications such as this one from Georgia Tech:

Don't be misled by the use of beefed-up mobile hardware to make this demo possible either. There are at least two software libraries available which allow the implementation of AR applications on standard mobile phones, namely Studierstube Tracker and d-touch. AR has definitely arrived. All that remains is for us to make use of it!