Making information real with the Hackerhat

Hacker(n) 1. A person who enjoys exploring the details of programmable systems and how to stretch their capabilities,

The 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

This entry was posted on October 31, 2010 at 11:15 am and is filed under Uncategorized.