Augmented Reality Virtual Keyboard using HTML 5 | Hacker News Reader

Augmented Reality Virtual Keyboard using HTML 5

nicklothian.com

16 pointsbpung7 comments

If you watch the end of this video http://www.ted.com/talks/pranav_mistry_the_thrilling_potenti... which was posted on HN a couple of days back, you will see a lot of things that he proposes which can completely change how we interact.

He not only gives an example of virtual keyboard, he also gives example of a paper can be converted into a touch screen with a motion sensor.

Highly recommended video.

I didn't know you could download MP4 videos of TED talks! (links below the video)

http://video.ted.com/talks/podcast/PranavMistry_2009I_480.mp...

Take a look at some of the ARKit stuff linked from the blog post - that's pretty impressive, too.

With quite a few Augmented Reality iPhone apps currently in development, along with creative new approaches such as this use of HTML 5 video, I see Augmented Reality as a frontier with a great deal of space for startups to flourish.

Thanks

Personally, I'm becoming convinced of two things:

1) Sci-Fi AR is much, much closer than people think. Obviously iPhone/Androids apps are a good first step, but Minority Report style UI's within 2 years wouldn't surprise me.

2) AR is going to be HUGE. I think there is a distinct possibility that AR could be bigger than the web. It feels odd saying that.

The one thing holding it back is the lack of the AR equivalent of HTML/HTTP. At the moment everything is proprietary. Hopefully, HTML5+Extensions (eg http://www.w3.org/2009/05/DeviceAPICharter) will get there soon.

I'm confused. It doesn't seem there's a way to read the webcam from HTML5, right? Did he just upload a video? Or am I missing something here?

The demo is using a recorded video in the left view, with JS processing on the right. When he (I) was developing it, I used VLC to stream the webcam to the page.

If you view-source, I've got a link to the documentation on how I did that: "To use this with a webcam instead of a saved video you'll need to stream your webcam via the same domain this is running from. http://nicklothian.com/blog/2009/11/17/using-a-webcam-with-h... has some docs on this."

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