Augmented Interior Design
To paint your living room you have to remove all the furniture. Then you must lay down covers so the floor does not get paint on it. After that comes the masking of windows, door frames, etc. Now you are ready to get paint all over a set of clothing you don’t particularly care about. Then, hopefully, some of the paint gets on the walls. What if you could skip all of that and change the color and even the texture of your walls just by pressing a few buttons?
To pull off such a feat, augmented reality comes to the rescue! Augmented reality, or AR, is a blending of “true” reality and virtual reality. Generally AR systems use computers to track the motion of objects and use that data to overlay useful information into our field of vision–such as adding virtual objects to the real world. Most applications to date have involved camera setups which track 2D “barcodes” to achieve motion tracking.
A great example of this can be seen in the YouTube video I have embedded below. It shows a demo of such barcode tracking being used to turn everyday objects into fantastical imagery from Harry Potter. A baseball cap turns into the Sorting Hat, a stick turns into a sword, a piece of paper becomes The Marauder’s Map and a cardboard box holds a Golden Snitch.
One hurdle to putting augmented reality into general use is getting such functionality off a computer monitor and placed directly in front of our eyes. Head mounted displays with optics to overlay a screen onto the real world are the common solution. At this point in time, however, commercially available HMDs are bulky and generally in need of wired power sources. But that is changing quickly as more companies put R&D into augmented reality technologies.
So how does this relate to interior design and painting your living room walls? Take a look at the diagram below:
So here we have a gentleman who is ecstatic (if you could see his face, he’s got a huge grin) that he doesn’t have to get covered in paint in order to change the look of his wall. The funny looking symbols on the four corners of the wall are what an AR system would use to track the location of the wall. This would then be used to overlay whatever color, pattern or texture our happy ex-painter wishes. The next diagram shows that he settled on a Victorian wallpaper. Note that the tracking symbols would not be seen by the user of the system, I have simply left them visible as a reference point.
As I mentioned earlier, the easiest way of pulling this off with today’s technology is with a head mounted display. So a major limitation would be that only people who are wearing a HMD would be able to see the texture on the wall. In addition to the HMD, the motion tracking system would also need to be head mounted so the wall doesn’t require a camera to track the user’s head. But as technology proceeds forward, the limitations will disappear. People like Johnny Chung Lee are showing us how to use easily accessed devices like the Nintendo Wii remote to do high quality head tracking. Nanotechnology is driving the size of all technology smaller and smaller so that HMDs will turn into contact lens displays and allow batteries to supply the necessary power to make the systems mobile.