Notational

prostheticknowledge:

Paste augmented-reality video graffiti on the streets 

Technology being developed for annotating animated material at locations using augmented reality - via New Scientist:

Using the AR apps available for smartphones or tablets, anybody can overlay digital text, video and graphics onto the physical world for others to see later. Most major cities are teeming with these digital annotations. You just need to identify a tagged location using your smartphone’s map, and watch through the camera using an AR app. Hey presto, a video or animation will then be overlaid on the scene.

Yet if somebody wants to annotate a place with video that they’ve filmed themselves, today’s apps are constrained. They can only overlay a YouTube clip, say, in its original rectangular shape. Now Tobias Langlotz of Graz University of Technology, Austria, and colleagues have designed software that can cut a person or an object out of a video, so that they alone can be pasted as a digital overlay. The idea is to make virtual human guides that could offer city tours or how-to demos, as well as enhancing AR games.

Langlotz and colleagues used a computer-imaging technique called foreground-background segmentation to identify the required foreground object - usually a person. So a user would film a video, then simply point to the object they wanted to extract. The software would do the rest. In a demo, they filmed a skateboarder doing a jump, and showed how he could be pasted onto a street scene. When the app “sees” the environment, it can replay the person in the right place, skating along the ground, for example.

You can find out more and watch a video at New Scientist here