Hey guys

So a little while ago I said that I was going to review the new Open Scene Graph 3: Beginners Guide book from Packt Publishing. Unfortunately, I still haven’t had time to do the review. However, I thought I would mention that all through April Packt Publishing are running discounts on all of their Graphics books!

During April, Packt will be running a series of discounts and promotions on a selection of its Open Source Graphic books wherein readers can avail exclusive discounts of 20% and 30% off the cover price of Graphic print books and eBooks.

So, I suggest you go check out what they have to offer:

http://www.packtpub.com/article/graphic-open-source

Cheers
Michael

Full Disclosure: I have nothing to do with Packt Publishing. However, they did give me a free e-book version of the OSG3 Beginners Guide for me to review. I feel a little bit guilty that I haven’t done the review yet. Other than that, I have no affiliation with Packt Publishing, and I didn’t get anything for posting this. So I haven’t sold out. In my opinion, someone going out of their way to produce documentation and reference books for Open Source Software is a good thing!

Hello Everyone

3DUI has wrapped up for the year, so here is our second publication. We introduce a new material for freeform sculpting in spatial augmented reality environments. Please read the paper, and have a look at the video below.

Hey Everyone

So right now I am at the IEEE Symposium on 3D User Interfaces in Singapore. We have a couple of publications which I’ll be posting over the next few days. First up is Adaptive Color Marker for SAR Environments. In a previous study we created interactive virtual control panels by projecting onto otherwise blank designs. We used a simple orange marker to track the position of the user’s finger. However, in a SAR environment, this approach suffers from several problems:

• The tracking system can’t track the marker if we project the same colour as the marker.
• Projecting onto the marker changes it’s appearance, causing tracking to fail.
• Users could not tell when they were pressing virtual controls, because their finger occluded the projection.

We address these problems with an active colour marker. We use a colour sensor to detect what is being projected onto the marker, and change the colour of the marker to an opposite colour, so that tracking continues to work. In addition, we can use the active marker as a form of visual feedback. For example, we can change the colour to indicate a virtual button press.

I’ve added the publication to my publications page, and here’s the video of the marker in action.

This weekend I presented my paper, Augmented Foam Sculpting for Capturing 3D Models, at the International symposium on 3D user interfaces. Since the conference has passed, I have added the video to youtube and the paper to my publications page. First, the video, then some discussion after the jump.

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