my toy obsessions always leads me to check out the toy isles of Michael’s and Jo-Anns. past several years the “craft” stores where mostly girls and moms get supplies for their sewing and scrapbooking started to carry computer aided design books and toys. From my experience being able to mix traditional crafts discipline and technology opens up so many opportunities for jobs in real world.
crayola’s AR coloring books Color Alive and a pose-to-pose mannequin keyframe animation toy Easy Animation Studio (couldn’t resist trying this out from the title alone) apps are created by DAQRI which is a big industrial AR company. this fall they’ll be releasing the open source SDK ARToolKit and I cannot wait to try it out!
coloring books were cool and I liked the animation cycles in each page and color mapping was impressive for $4 purchase with JoAnn coupon. i hope that making animation was as easy as Easy Animation Studio… but the use of basic idea of “motion capture” using the target markers on mannequin is not much different from real mocap system. markers on the mannequin were highlighted as they were getting recognized by the camera. i had to rotate the mannequin for the camera while 3D model’s pose settling down as its solving the position in space since there is no depth sensor but pretty cool for $8 toy (I got a bundle deal from amazon). i’ll have to learn how to use positional marking techniques in Vuforia anyway so this was a good hands-on experience for me what limitations were without the use of depth detection. i’ve read the paper by Dis. research on AR coloring book technology but it must be a true magic to kids when they see first time!
