Augmented reality at the Allard Pierson Museum

At the Allard Pierson Museum in  Amsterdam, they’ve setup a simple “Augmented Reality” setup to allow visitors to view paintings and photographs, and see overlays of specific data appear in the augmented display.

There are two types of hardware on hand — both the MovableScreen-packin’ iMac stationary display and the UMPC devices allow the user to seemingly view through the photos, exploring specific points of interest

I’m not seeing any particularly fascinating technology.  From the supplied video, it looks almost like it’s simply a stepper motor controlling what’s displayed to the user, so no image recognition and processing work. An astute site-visitor pointed out that they have a decent Writeup of the project that claims they are using video overlays, with a camera mounted on the back of the displays.  Orientation within the poster is done with technology from a product called iTACITUS, which can perform image matching to find the camera picture within the poster.

If anyone’s in the area, I’ld love to hear more about it.  Video after the break.

via Augmented reality on hand at museum in the Netherlands, threatens to make learning cool.

This story written by Randall Hand

Randall Hand is a visualization scientist working for a federal research lab, aiding researchers to discover the insights buried within their terabyte datasets generated on some of the most powerful supercomputers in the world. He also runs VizWorld.com .