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

A group of Augmented Reality (AR) industry leaders have gotten together to organize the first ever AR Industry event on June 2 – 3, in Santa Clara, U.S.A. The event, which will focus on industry and practice, will include keynote speakers like Bruce Sterling, reputed fiction writer and leading AR thinker, amongst others.

In the wake of YDreams and Canesta’s recent announcement to partner ‘to take Augmented Reality mainstream’, we couldn’t possibly miss this event, so our own Ivan Franco, YDreams R&D Director, will be on hand as an event speaker to talk about how he feels ‘augmented reality will change the way we market and use products, communicate and entertain ourselves, and how together with Canesta, we look forward to making augmented reality a part of everyday life.’

“Augmented reality will change the way we market and use products, communicate and entertain ourselves,” said Ivan Franco YDreams´ R&D Director. “But, to date, implementing augmented reality solutions has only been possible with very specialized techniques. By working together with Canesta, we look forward to making augmented reality a part of everyday life.”

YDreams has been working on Natural User Interfaces (NUI) for more than 9 years for some of the largest corporations in the world. To do this, the company has developed a sophisticated proprietary software platform, combining multiple advanced technologies such as computer vision, physics simulation, artificial intelligence and several others.

“One of the most difficult aspects of designing NUI applications has been to create a sense of real world interactions. We envision consumers naturally browsing through digital catalogs, adding to the user experience of ecommerce or being inside movies, delivered by IPTV platforms.”

Until now Augmented Reality has delivered limited applications to the general public, mostly offering 3-D objects on top of visually obtrusive markers. By using Canesta’s 3-D vision sensors, YDreams applications can do real-time capture of any object in 3-D, without the aid of any special markers or enhancements. “This completely changes the scope of where and how augmented reality can be used, said Franco.

“YDreams is among the world’s leading organizations in developing augmented reality experiences,” said Jim Spare, president and CEO of Canesta. “By combining our mass market 3-D input sensors with YDreams’ expertise, we will see broad uses of these formerly very specialized applications. This will change how immersive and realistic so many kinds of communications and interactions will become.”

A video of a demo can be viewed on YDreams’ official YouTube channel and it will be possible to experience the technology live at the ARE2010 event (augmentedrealityevent.com) on June 2-3, in Santa Clara, CA.

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.

Recently YDreams partnered with North American firm Canesta to produce its latest Augmented Reality 3D demo for CES 2010 in Las Vegas.

Portuguese TV program ‘Futuro Hoje’, hosted by Lourenço Medeiros, dedicated to covering the latest technology has to offer, visited the company to see for themselves what we were up to. More in the video below: