Augmented reality and aerial drone. There's an app also for that.

Parrot has been demonstrating at the 2010 CES show in Las Vegas the AR.Drone, a Wi-Fi helicopter with dual cameras and augmented-reality video streaming, that you control using your iPhone or iPod Touch. The AR.Drone features four rotors and interchangeable hulls for flying both indoors and outside. Built-in flight stabilization technology keeps the drone steady while you use your iPhone’s motion sensors to steer it remotely over the craft’s Wi-Fi network.
Parrot spent four years developing the AR.Drone and creating an augmented reality gaming platform. Using its streaming video camera, the AR.Drone image processing can detect other drones or 3D targets. Several demo games are on display, but Parrot hopes that game developers will take advantage of their open API to develop more games and other applications for the AR.Drone.
To make the AR.Drone easy to fly, Parrot developed a microelectromechanical (MEMS) inertial guidance system that includes a three-axis accelerometer, a two-axis gyroscope, and a single-axis precision gyroscope for yaw. The flyer also includes an ultrasonic altimeter and a down-facing video camera for calculating speed and position. By tilting your iPhone or iPod Touch you can drive the drone. The built-in Wi-Fi network is used to establish the connection between the drone and the iPhone, then the video camera on the drone streams its feed directly to the screen on your iPhone. If you remove your finger from the iPhone, the AR.Drone’s autopilot keeps the drone hovering about a meter off the ground. If the network connection is lost, the autopilot will stabilize the drone and slowly lower it to the ground for a soft landing.
Parrot hopes to make the AR.Drone available in the second half of 2010. For more information visit ardrone.parrot.com. For details about the open API, visit projects.ardrone.org.




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Augmented Reality on iPhone Apps

Today I want to talk about something popular in the iPhone golden world and is becoming a "must" for all the new cool applications: Augmented Reality.
Augmented Reality is a superimposing of a virtual objects generated from a computer with the real world captured from a camera. Synthetic object are placed into the real world by register them with the real space. A complete definition of Augmented Reality can be found in Wikipedia.
Who see the scene, perceive that the synthetic object is immersed into the real world.
Conventionally this technique is used to augment information given by the real world like for example superimposing a radiography or a tomography image of a patient over the real image of the patient itself.
This imply that your virtual world has to be registered with the real one by using drown patterns (like for example ARToolkit does) or marker placed on real world.
Recently, iPhone application shown this technique a bit altered (from the classical definition of AR) in my opinion. The synthetic elements shown in the device were not directly correlated to the images shown by the camera, but instead they were related with the position or orientation of the device.
I think that we are still far from having the "real" Augmented Reality on mobile devices with real-time rendering and high resolution that will do the user believe that what he is seeing is real.

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