santa’s augmented reality

as dirty as the title of this post sounds, and as much as i hate doing two christmas pieces in a row… i had to share this.
it’s the first non-prototype augmented reality site that i’ve seen in a readily available format online.
if you don’t understand any of those words… augmented reality is a term for a software that views a real-life object, and then takes information in that object and adds a graphic to it when viewed through a camera or lens of some kind.
a common example of AR are the graphics rendered on a football field to display the 1st down line.

you can read the boring wikipedia entry, or you can check out this virtual christmas card from McCann in Brazil.
all the instructions are in Portuguese, so i’ll tell you what you need to do to make it work.

1. go to the website
2. print out the pdf from the second link in the list
3. if your webcam doesn’t automatically show up in the big box in the middle: right click on it, choose settings, go to the webcam tab, and find your webcam in the list. if you don’t know which one it is, click down the list until it shows in the window.
4. show the printed pdf to the webcam and watch santa get funky fresh.

Posted by: Josh Abe on December 23, 2008

Filed under: Miscellaneous | No Comments