What’s a hackerhat?
Sunday, October 31st, 2010The hackerhat is designed to be an open-source platform for developing augmented reality applications. It runs in machine-independent Java, and is designed to allow for an augmented reality system to be implemented on any device that possesses a camera, java environment, and display of some type. It is a “pass-through” augmented reality system, which means that everything displayed on the diplay device passes through the processing system(as opposed to a pass-by system which optically superimposes computerized data on top of a transparent surface, like a pair of glasses.
The hackerhat can run speccially designed Java programs as “layers”. In the hackerhat design, each layer adds a particular piece of information to the visual display(i.e. navigation layer would display directions, a Twitter layer would pull trending topics from Twitter, etc.)
Other things it can do:
- Gestural control using a homemade motion tracking device
- (Somewhat rudiementary) integration with speech-recognition systems
- Layer APIs for easy accsess to network resources and image processing systems
- “Markerless” object recognition system
Cool things it will do in the near future:
- Have an integrated AI system!
- Be able to extract depth from a 2d image
- Support higher resolutions
- Insert complex virtual objects into the real world