Author Topic: Diminished Reality  (Read 990 times)

0 Members and 1 Guest are viewing this topic.

Offline Ghost1

  • Supreme Overlord
  • ******
  • Posts: 2,658
  • Reputation: 3220
  • Gender: Male
  • Boo
    • Bachelor's Grove
Diminished Reality
« on: Nov 05 2010 - 03:49PM »
This could be very scary technology, if this was misused.



Researchers at Ilmenau University of Technology in Germany have developed a new augmented reality technique that erases images from real time video. Called Diminished Reality, the software can take any area selected in a video feed and use photo-shop like adjustments to copy the surroundings into its place. Where once you saw an object now you see the object has been removed. A piece of your world has been erased. Diminished Reality records video from a camera and displays the modified result on a screen with only a 40ms delay. To your eyes it’s effectively instantaneous. Watch a demonstration of the augmented reality editing program in the video below. I’m blown away by how well it works in these early examples.
[float=right]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FgTq-AgYlTE&feature=player_embedded[/float]
The power to edit reality is going to create some amazing applications for this system. You could make certain people, or objects, invisible on live television – censorship and entertainment may never be the same again. You could create new augmented reality video games that not only add in virtual objects to your environment, but subtract real objects as well. Jan Herling and Wolfgang Broll, the researchers at Ilmenau’s Department of Virtual Worlds and Digital Games that created Diminished Reality, have suggested it may help us with urban planning and interior decorating – remove the old and envision the new all without changing a thing. The developers also suggest that Diminished Reality may be a counter to invasive ads and over stimulation. If DR could be incorporated into a pair of glasses you could filter out all the unwanted visuals around you. No more billboards, no more posters, no more commercials. For that matter, no more graffiti, no more trash on the streets… The ability to subtract things out of our view of reality could be amazingly seductive.
« Last Edit: Nov 05 2010 - 03:55PM by Ghost1 »
Always remember.........Just because you have never seen something, does not mean that something does not exist.