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Digital Storytelling with Augmented Reality - The Book is Just the Beginning [PDF KB]
Abstract
Digital storytelling provides an immersive experience, combining the power of your Intel® Core™ processor-based platform and the printed page. The augmented farm application demonstrates augmented reality through digital storytelling using the Intel® Perceptual Computing SDK.
Introduction
Imagine sitting down with your child and their favorite storybook. Together, you not only see the characters, but choose where they appear on the page. You interact with a virtual world overlaid upon the physical book. Augmented reality combines a real-world environment with computer-generated graphics, sound and other elements. Augmented reality and the Intel® Perceptual Computing SDK are complementary technologies that, when combined, have the potential to create immersive, compelling experiences.
Digital Storytelling – Augmented Farm
With perceptual computing, users interact with their devices and the virtual world using voice, 3D depth tracking, and face/head movements. Digital storytelling emerged through the blending of these technologies, and allows readers to interact naturally with the augmented world. This model drives the creation of next generation media creation and consumption. By breaking the barriers between the traditional media types (e-books, video clip, games, and greeting cards), this form of entertainment has astounding possibility. This demo will inspire content providers by showing them new ways to consume their media.
Virtual Exploration - When you show a page from the book to an application enabled with augmented reality, the page first needs to be recognized via a user-facing RGB and 3D depth camera.
The image at top shows the reader holding the storybook page in front of the computer’s camera, starting the recognition and augmentation processes. The series below starts with the flat page, then as an augmented image after it is recognized and portrayed on-screen. The third image in the series shows SDK enabled object tracking (book rotation). The final image in this series shows the reader manipulating the animated characters with his hand.
Flat page | Augmented image of page | Augmentation tracking page | Interacting w/augmented page |
Character Interaction– Another feature in our demo allows the reader to interact with an on-page character. The series of images below show the page captured through the 3D camera and recognized by the object recognition capabilities included in the SDK. Then the page is tracked via additional SDK elements, allowing the super-imposed butterfly to be added within the book’s screen space along with the reader. We then see the SDK’s short-range gesture recognition functions combining with multiple image recognition elements and tracking when the butterfly flies from the page to the outstretched hand. In the final image, the reader continues to explore the book’s world although the book is out of view of the computer’s camera.
Storybook page recognized | Butterfly added to screen | Butterfly flies to hand | Book no longer required |
Conclusion
Digital storytelling only scratches the surface of what can be accomplished using the Intel® Perceptual Computing SDK for fully immersive media interaction. Combining real world recognition (like the pages of the book) with other perceptual computing modes, such as close-range 3D hand tracking (used in the butterfly portion of this demo) opens up endless possibilities for media consumption. The book is just the beginning, get started using the Intel® Perceptual computing SDK to implement your own reality soon.
Information on this SDK
This demonstration was implemented using the Intel® Perceptual Computing SDK 2013. (http://intel.com/software/perceptual)
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