From artists’ workshop to castles, palaces, churches, private collections and then to public museums, art, in the course of its history, has been ever closer to the public, for the greater good. Museums have become the sanctuary of humanity’s masterpieces. Still, the museum experience is still much contemplative. Our relationship to artworks remains distant. What if we could take artworks out of museums? What if we could easily preview what La Joconde and Rodin’s thinker would look like in our own home? It sounds like the sense of art history, and technology makes it now feasible.

Augmented Reality, or the display of virtual elements in the real world, has the power to integrate absolutely all world’s artworks in our own homes. Augment, a free mobile app for iPad, iPhone, and Android, is gathering paintings, posters and photos in a worldwide catalogue. It lets people try them on their walls, creating a new relationship to art, much more engaging and personal.

Art sites can easily add an Augment button on their product page to empower their art business with Augmented Reality.

Do you think Augmented Reality or other technologies can transform our relationship to art?

Visit our Augment’s Art Section for more information.

Today was the first day of the Laval Virtual show. It’s the biggest French meeting for virtual and augmented reality companies. After a full day going from one stand to the other, here is what we can say about the current state of the AR.

1. Markerless augmented reality everywhere

And when I say marker less, I really mean it. I’m not talking about the natural features tracking that still needs some sort of image or shape to give a reference point for the tracking algorithm (yes, Augment is one of those). The technologies I saw there are able to detect any known object and overlay precisely on top of it information or 3d models. 

2.3D scanning

When you think about augmented reality, you think about 3D models. And at some point, those models need to be created. At Laval Virtual there were a lot of exciting 3d scanning companies. For instance, Digiteyezer announced and showcased their new face scanning tool that allows you to be inserted inside a game or as a virtual avatar in a chat app in one go. On the other hand, Bony3D andSolidexpress had a sub millimeter 3d scanner that lets you see the smallest detail, in 3D.

3. 3d printing

When you have your 3d model, you can display it, but what’s even more interesting is that you can print it out again with a different size, material or slightly modified shape. 3d printers are getting cheaper year after year and at Laval some of them were actually affordable. I mean, like a cd recorder was 15 years ago. You can guess where it’s going.

4. Kinect, thousands of them

The Kinect is really the device any stand need to have. It’s everywhere. Most of the time used for its orginal purpose, to detect body movements and control something. This something means a character, a robotic arm, a 3d object or a car. The non-standard usages were harder to guess, like this korean metal bump controlled by the movement of a candy wrap in yellow tape and used to turn around little cubes. (see the bonus section)

5.Mind controlled computers

There was a guy showcasing a compact device that reads brainwaves and translates them into actions. In this case it was to move in a first person game. How is this related to augmented reality ? Simple, when you’ll get those fancy ar glasses, you’ll need a way to control how to use them. If you want to know what object you are looking at, you could simply look at it and think “define”. The software would translate your thought into action an open the wikipedia page related to the object. To do that you need a compact device that can be mounted on a pair of glasses. It seems we are going in this direction. In no time we will be able to look at someone and think “friend”, “follow” or “block”.

Bonus : The crazy Asian stuff.

Like in any other tech conference, you need some japanese and korean to show things that are still to far edged for us. This time my preference go to the MoleBot. But the “model and draw” display was quite awesome too. It’s a surface that fell like sand, you can harden or soften it to create shapes. Then you select a color and draw something on the 3d surface you’ve just created. Another cool stuff was an haptic gantlet that let you feel the texture of virtual object. And with a little scanner they are even able to record a surface and assign it to a 3d virtual entity. Then when you touch it you get the feeling that it’s the real surface. Awesome.