Project Meeting & Augmented Reality Progression

I had my first meeting back with Gianni after the Easter break and explained how the idea had changed from the public physical environment to the new Augmented Reality idea. I explained my idea to him and the idea of creating a printed book that would enable constantly updatable content to be displayed within it. Gianni seemed happy with this idea but suggested that rather setting the physical book in stone, in terms of printed symbols, why not create a photo album that allows the user to change the web content being displayed as well as being able to change the physical symbols so the book itself also becomes more interactive. The idea to make the AR photo album act like a real photo album that gives the user the choice to move AR symbols around in the album as well being able to completely remove markers that would in turn remove digital content from the physical environment with the option to add it again at a later time.

At this point of the meeting I had followed a number of tutorials regarding Augmented Reality to create using action script a method of creating and displaying a 3D cube on on AR marker. I had been successful in setting up the action script file so that it displays a webcam window and connects to the relevant technology to enable me to display and create AR material. I will post further info about the AR technology and my progression with using it.

Project Update

So after deciding to change the current project from a using a physical environment and spoken words to create digital content in the form of tweets I have decided to stick with the idea of physical and digital interaction and came up with the idea of developing an augmented reality photo album.

The idea behind this project is to still take digital web content and display it in a physical form, in this case a printed book. I intend to use web images rather than tweets to create an online photo album, the likes of flickr, photo bucket etc, but be able to display and store the web content within a physical book that can be consumed and distributed in a traditional way.

I hope to print the book with a number of printed AR Makers that will constantly update depending on content being published to the web. This will enable a physical album to be constantly updated with current web content despite the fact the book itself is in finished form.

Augmented reality is a method that will allow the book to remain in its original form and be viewed via a webcam or camcorder to display the content within it. This also looks at the idea of unauthorised use of content and restricted use of content in terms of the physical book itself will feature black and white markers that really don't mean anything when viewed on its own, but place it under a webcam and view it via that it will reveal digital web content that can be interchangeable dependant on the current content published to the web.

Below is an example of a 3D model being projected onto an AR marker:

Project Progression and Limitations

So after a couple of weeks of working on the current project idea, I have stumbled into some problems and major flaws in my idea. The major issue with the project is the unreliability of the aka.listen speech recognition object for max/MSP. The main issue with speech recognition is that it is not entirely developed enough to understand every word spoken and often takes numerous attempts for it to pick up a word, be it the intended word or not.

The other issue is the fact that specific words have to be assigned in the first place in order for any word to be recognised. I can't seem to find a solution to efficiently adding enough words to make the project autonomous so that it is not pre determined. There seems to be no solution after searching days for one to add an entire dictionary or similar to the speech recognition object it seems there is no real solution to this issue, so after much thought I've got no choice than to change or seriously adapt the project to make it more reliable and feasible in its creation.