Paste Augmented-Reality Video Graffiti on the Streets
Paste Augmented-Reality Video Graffiti on the Streets
LOOK closely and you can find digital graffiti right under your nose: people have daubed videos, animations and comments over buildings and streets around the world. Soon there could be a new type of tag in our cities - cut-and-pasted people - thanks to a technique for editing augmented reality (AR) videos.
Using the AR apps available for smartphones or tablets, anybody can overlay digital text, video and graphics onto the physical world for others to see later. Most major cities are teeming with these digital annotations. You just need to identify a tagged location using your smartphone’s map, and watch through the camera using an AR app. Hey presto, a video or animation will then be overlaid on the scene.
Yet if somebody wants to annotate a place with video that they’ve filmed themselves, today’s apps are constrained. They can only overlay a YouTube clip, say, in its original rectangular shape. Now Tobias Langlotz of Graz University of Technology, Austria, and colleagues have designed software that can cut a person or an object out of a video, so that they alone can be pasted as a digital overlay. The idea is to make virtual human guides that could offer city tours or how-to demos, as well as enhancing AR games.