Flapi, our in-house Augmented Reality mascot, is in the spotlight again. After a high-profile stint at Engadget, this time Flapi stars in an Exame Informática (a Portuguese leading IT magazine) article and video.

You can find the video below, where Ivan Franco, our R&D Director, talks about YDreams’ work with Augmented Reality, and showcases Flapi and the Interactive Bubbles (in portuguese):

YDreams’ Flapi movie has been recently featured on popular tech blog - Engadget, so I thought I’d give you a little insight into our latest Augmented Reality project.

Following other YDreams’ products with AR, such as the Virtual Sightseeing Scenic Viewer and augmented books, SimVideo extends the possibilities of these technology applications by providing a large set of tracking, simulation and composition functionalities with very low hardware requirements, due to a very powerful proprietary platform.

With this technology we envision applications such as real time competition with F1 drivers during a Grand Prix Tv transmission, the re-enactment of famous movies, performing alongside or replacing ones favourite actors (imagine Woody Allen´s Broadway Danny Rose inverted) and an enormous variety of augmented reality applications.

With SimVideo, video feeds that are either live or pre-recorded can gain new levels of interest through the addition of an individual layer of contextualized interactivity.

SimVideo implements static and dynamic occlusion, static and dynamic shadow casting, collision detection and physics.

Related experiences have demonstrated real characters interacting with virtual objects, new developments already undertaken in SimVideo are leading to virtual characters affecting and controlling real world objects. Soon one will be able to see Flapi turning real lights on and off and other real world objects controlled by virtual characters.

The main idea is merging real and virtual life in a seamless universe that tends to become one.

And if you haven’t seen the video: