Aurelijus Banelis

Introduction to Computer Vision via WebCam game example.

• Try WebCam game during presentation
• Understand, how motion detection works with the help of OpenCV libraries
• Understand, the problem of low lighting and noise
• Hear real-world example of using WebCam games
• Fork and create your own WebCam game

Who should attend

• [Mostly] Software developers, especially with the background of C/C++ or willing to learn OpenCV – because speaker would be illustrating principles, how his game works, so later you could (fork and) create your own version.
• Project managers and entrepreneurs, because some business cases would also be discussed
• Bored people, who just want some interactive game during the presentation.

Back-story for the presentation

• Colleague from HR: I found a video about augmented gaming climbing wall, would it be hard to implement something like it.
• Well... I was playing with similar technology some time ago – answered. Found my 6 years old project and to my surprise – it was still working (actually spent about an hour to install dependencies and fix include values). That is what backward-compatible open source software really means :)

WebCam based games still gives WOW effect (still trending, still looks new). But why it is not mainstream after 6 years? To answer that question, lets dig into some implementation and bussiness use cases.

Content of the presentation/DEMO

• Introduction: LIVE demonstration of WebCam based game: Yes – audience could play from their seats by moving their hands :)
• Business case: Why not mass production? Example: advertisement for IT recruitment and meetups
• Implementation details: rocket science or comparing pixels (visual debugging info would be shown, while others are playing)? The problem of lighting and noise.
• Discussion/question: Why not mainstream: hardware problems, trend to (not) learn C/C++, difficulty of OpenGL lighting (if there would not be other questions)

Augmented reality is not a new technology, but still impress people, when they see 3D person rising out of the paper. What about Augmented reality costume? Do you want to make one for yourself?

Presentation will go through augmented reality technologies (in particular: computer vision and 3D graphics), showing, what it is really like to make augmented reality based product: what tools to use, what concepts you need to know to make design decisions.

There was Christmas party in my company with dress code: future. So I decided, that realistic future is not physical cloths of Storm trouper from StarWars, but cloths designed for Augmented reality. Initial idea was to create full blown Augmented reality costume, but with current deadlines and available technologies results was: Android app, that will put Storm trouper helmet only on me and some smaller 3D models when you look closer into the T-shirt.

So I created end-to-end Augmented reality product and have some practical experience to share with you.

Technology stack was fully Open Source or free: ARToolKit, Blender, AndoridSDK, InkScape (little OpenCV for presentation purpose only). Presentation will not be only a list of technologies, but more like: concepts and how they influenced various decisions in making final product.