Researchers Use Oculus Rift And Augmented Reality To Put Facebook On Your Wall

Do you want to have a Facebook wall on your actual wall? With the work of a bunch of certified geniuses combining virtual reality and depth-sensing cameras like Microsoft’s Kinect, it’s now possible.

At the International Symposium On Mixed And Augmented Reality in Munich, Germany, researchers Renato F. Salas-Moreno, Ben Glocker, Paul H. J. Kelly and Andrew J. Davison showed off the Dense Planar SLAM, a system for mapping real-world environments in real time with a surprisingly high level of detail. A combination of various sensor arrays — an ASUS Xtion depth and motion sensor and an Oculus Rift DK1 development kit — let the researchers map flat surfaces within a space without requiring massive processing power, enabling a see-through virtual reality world where your kitchen splashback can show you a recipe or your bathroom mirror can scroll through WebMD.

Using higher-level entities during mapping has the potential to improve camera localisation performance and give substantial perception capabilities to real-time 3D SLAM systems. We present an efficient new real-time approach which densely maps an environment using bounded planes and surfels extracted from depth images (like those produced by RGB-D sensors or dense multi-view stereo reconstruction). Our method offers the every-pixel descriptive power of the latest dense SLAM approaches, but takes advantage directly of the planarity of many parts of real-world scenes via a data-driven process to directly regularize planar regions and represent their accurate extent efficiently using an occupancy approach with on-line compression. Large areas can be mapped efficiently and with useful semantic planar structure which enables intuitive and useful AR applications such as using any wall or other planar surface in a scene to display a user’s content.

I understand some of those words. [YouTube]


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