AR Sandbox
The Challenge
Having a young daughter it can be hard to find the time to pursue my various projects. But those ideas don’t stop coming and , instead of building unreliable cars to take on 6 month road-trips I needed to re-align the direction my projects were going.
Having seen the amazing source for this project I was hooked and instantly decided to build a system as a base for other experimentation. My daughter was barely 1 at the time.
The Solution
Augmented reality is an ingenious solution to age old problem. Interactive VR environments can be engaging but lack realism, and pre-rendered content can feel like a roller-coaster ride. However the “real” world is a lovely platform for placing VR content and by leveraging what already exists we can realize compelling solutions with far less time.
- Normal sand-table. Using a highly diffuse sand with great reflectance properties.
- Kinect to do scanning of the sand surface at 30 frames per second.
- HD Projector to reproject the topography back on to the surface
- Future plans to extend the sandbox. Interactive games, prescribed rather than captured sandbox.
