With technology growing at a pace that it is the philosophical belief that ‘Reality is nothing more than mere perception’ is becoming all the more true. With Cg technology evolving and intertwining with the available Augmented Technology we are creating a virtual world in a real world that cannot be distinguished separately just by the mere sense of vision. Illusion has never ever been more real and the non-existent has never before been so present!
Augmented Reality projects have most recently focused on war games, but a new lab at the Mawson Institute for Advanced Manufacturing will bring this technology closer to home. The University of South Australia’s Wearable Computer Lab is building the 100-sq.meter AR visualization center to improve AR quality and serve as a ‘magic box’ for related visual technologies. It will include forty projector systems, two wearable VR-style systems, and a control room that will track the movements of multiple users.
The space is built large enough to fit large artifacts (like cars), so that visual cues can be projected onto a physical item or realized in virtuality through embedded-display glasses. Augmented Reality is a CG-based technology that is evolving from a static visual representation of data in virtual reality to one that responds to a user in real time. AR is already being used by a few automakers to preview virtual depictions of engineering schematics.
A designer can create an aerodynamic hatchback design and set up a 3D preview in real space. This should definitely be a more realistic, and impressive, demonstration than a PowerPoint. An example that illustrates the usefulness of this lab is the idea that a company will be able to roll in a car with body dents, and then superimpose the correct car schematics from the manufacturer to assess the total damage. That really does blur the lines between the real and virtual world!
Via: blog.wired
