The 2014 FIFA World Cup is just around the corner and Rio de Janeiro’s Maracanã Stadium is set to host the final game.

While work to renovate and upgrade the stadium is in full force, fans can check out YDreams’ Augmented Reality app, developed in collaboration with Sirius for Odebrect Construction, to get a better look at the 3D model of the new & improved stadium.

Sport Club Recife, a football team in North-eastern Brazil, recently posted the video below showing the club using YVision’s free Beta version of its software development kit (SDK) to create a Boxfall application featuring 3D Augmented Reality cubes customized with the team’s logo!

Yvision, a YDreams’ spinout, is dedicated to the research and production of software development kits. To find out more about them, or download their SDK, visit their website at http://www.yvision.com.

Today, YDreams’ Natural User Interfaces (NUI) division is officially releasing the free Beta version of its YVision software development kit (SDK), via its dedicated website at http://www.yvision.com.

YVision is the result of ten years of research and development in human-computer interaction. Created by the company division that focuses solely on NUI design and software architecture, this framework is behind many of YDreams’ interactive solutions and has been deployed in thousands of engaging and robust NUI applications.

According to Ivan Franco, YDreams’ Director of R&D, “Our framework is the missing link between traditional Game Engines and Natural User Interfaces. It promotes creativity and expressivity, by offloading the complex interoperability of the multiple technologies, which are indispensable to deliver state-of-the-art interactive products.”

YVision is a component-based framework that allows programmers to develop complex systems based on pre-built modules, which are operated by behavior trees. The .NET – based framework assures faster development, removes the need for complex resource handling and offers users multi-platform deployment for desktops, mobiles and consoles.

The SDK features a full abstraction layer for real-time 3D rendering and was also designed to support the upcoming Microsoft Silverlight 5, enabling users to build the next full 3D experience for the web browser. In addition, YVision offers state-of-the-art physics and computer vision. The creation of NUI applications also depends heavily on sensor acquisition and processing, so YVision is ready to process complex sensor data and manage several kinds of input devices.

“The current beta release is for PCs only. Because we want to offer the best possible experience, extensive testing is being carried out for the Mac and Silverlight platforms, and mobile platforms will soon follow”, explains Mr. Franco,“Stay tuned, because we intend to follow the ‘release often’ motto”.

The SDK, along with detailed information and instructions, is available for download via the following URL: http://www.yvision.com. We hope you will enjoy it and look forward to hearing your feedback!

YVision, our proprietary tech platform, now runs on all major browsers! Brief video below shows Beta version with real-time, 3D interaction, being tested:

Not long ago Cisco gave us this concept video on the future of shopping:

We’ve gone beyond the concept and are on our way to making it, and a whole lot more possible

YDreams has been working on natural user interfaces (NUI) for around 9 years. We’ve been using primarily web-cameras for the detection of people and objects, as these are non-intrusive and are a very rich multi-vector sensor.

In the beginning each new application was a copy-paste of source from the previous projects plus, all the customization code and a few more features. As you can imagine, maintenance was a nightmare. From very early on, we felt the need to have a reusable development framework. It would allow us to take less time developing the applications, make them more robust and leave us time to keep innovating. As a result, we have successfully deployed hundreds of applications for our customers, which you can find in museums, stores, events and movie theaters.

The resulting framework also allows us to share our knowledge across the development process. We have great people that are very good at different areas of expertise but we cannot have all of them working on every project. Their knowledge is added to the framework to be used by others. It includes multi-threading, image processing, tracking, 3D real-time graphics and physics, artificial intelligence, Free Frame plugins, Flash integration into 3D graphics, USB, FireWire and IP (Ethernet) video cameras, Microsoft Surface support, etc.

The platform is used in almost all our interactive applications and recently was used on the robots we created for Santander. The platform allowed us to have a 3D simulation of their behaviors even before we had the physical robots. The exact same code that was used in the simulator is now running in the robots themselves.

We recently partnered with Canesta and added support for their time-of-flight depth-sensing video cameras. These cameras can detect the distance of the real objects to the camera.

We already had interactive applications combining real and virtual in real-time. Now it is also registered in 3D, fully complying with the augmented reality definition by Azuma.

This is just one more feature added to many others in the framework. Creating the demo was very simple. Its objective was to show the capabilities of the camera and also perform the first usability tests. We wanted to know how users would perceive the “invisible” 3D objects and what type of interactions are possible. It has been a big success with all the users.

Visit our booth at ARE2010 to try this demo yourself and get more details on our framework.

We’re pretty excited about this cool piece of news! We just found out that our ‘Playing in an Augmented World’ demo-mix submitted at this year’s MIX09 Showoff contest, and presented to hundreds of peers in Las Vegas, received an honorable mention!

The demo put together by YLabs (our in-house R&D lab) shows-off some real- time interaction with 3D objects using a webcam.

Again, congratulations to all involved.

Have a look as one of our YLabbies tests some YVision-based apps on Magalhães (the made-in-Portugal classmate pc) with an Intel(R) Atom(TM) N270 CPU @ 1.60GHz and an Intel(R) 945 Express chipset.

Camera-based interaction on a netbook from YDreams on Vimeo.