Zenitum’s iKat Augmented Reality Virtual Pets

What do you get when you combine Virtual Pets with everyone’s favorite whiz-bang technology Augmented Reality?  Zenitum hopes it’s a new cash cow in ‘iKat’, a markerless augmented reality pet simulator.

Virtual pet’s and augmented reality are nothing new, but the real neat feature of this particular app is the markerless nature.  No marker is required, after a few seconds of analyzing video the app has gathered enough information to construct basic geometry of the surroundings and is able to track motion.  Even this technology is old hat, having been demo’ed on the PS3 long ago as Sony’s Virtual Pet game EyePet, but this is the first time I’ve seen similar results from a mobile device, an Android Phone from the example videos.

Looks pretty neat, although still in early beta. See two demonstration videos of the technology below (one after the break).

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 .