Augmented Reality Cow From Illinois

Another awesome Augmented Reality from Sensei and friend-of-the-blog Alan Craig (famous for, among other things, this): a detailed augmented reality “visual cow” for veterinary students.  The project is a collaboration with the University of Illinois College of Veterinary Medicine.

Janet Sinn-Hanlon, Alan Craig and Kerry Helms pose with “Dr. Moolittle.” The veterinary medicine design team created an app that allows users to see a cow’s internal organs and systems in 3-D when a device is pointed at Dr. Moolittle. Photo by L. Brian Stauffer

While not a substitute for studying real animals, the detailed graphics are a potentially useful bridge between 2D images and the (possibly messy) 3D reality.

The AR works at both desktop scale, as a 3D textbook illustration, and at full scale, as a virtual “visible cow”.

A design team at the College of Veterinary Medicine created “Desktop Bessie,” an augmented reality cow that shows a cow’s internal anatomy in 3-D from various angles. It can be used to help veterinary medicine students learn anatomy. Video by L. Brian Stauffer. GIF created by Anne Lukeman.

The full scale version is registered so that the internal structures and organs are visible “inside” a full size fiberglass cow! (Who is apparently knwn as Dr. Moolittle.) I really love this particular effect, because it is a sort of magic xray, looking inside the cow. You have to see it to really grok how compelling this illusion really is.

So cool!

Right now the 3D imagery is an idealized fixed display (a la the diagrams in a textbook), but it is easy to imagine driving the display with computation and data. So, you could illustrate what you might see if the cow is pregnant or sick or something. And, with some work, you could link this to realtime imaging, to project the actual imagery of an animal onto the animal itself.

OK, I know the realtime stuff is actually quite difficult, so I don’t expect it next year.  But it’s possible, and certainly seems like a mountain we have to climb, no?

Cool Augmented Reality at University of Illinois Graduation

JUST IN:  A documentary about this project, broadcast on the Big Ten network.

The Champaign Urbana Community Fab Lab contributed to a special Augmented Reality installation for the University of Illinois graduation ceremonies.

See the official press release and ‘about‘ page, and the students’ pix.

The Alma Mater statue is being restored, which created a crisis:  this would be the only year for decades in which graduates could not get their picture snapped under Alma’s wide arms.

The campus powers that be wanted to do something, and asked Alan Craig if it would be possible to us Augmented Reality to put Alma–restored–on her pedestal, so people could get a snapshot.  Alan and I conferred, and the conclusion was YES WE CAN, and more over, WE MUST.

The image was based on high resolution scans of the statue in the restoration process (which the University should have done for documentation anyway), cleaned up and rendered by the Beckman Institute Visualization Lab led by our colleague Travis Ross.

Besides my own contribution as software integrator, Andrew Knight of the CUCFL created a custom rig to hold an tablet computer on a camera tripod.  You can buy similar products, but why would you buy one when you have a Fab Lab? 🙂

I was particularly happy to contribute to this project because it is a great example of using contemporary IT to create experiences that strengthen our social and human bonds.  This installation was meaningful mainly as part of a social ritual (largely invented bottom-up by generations of students), and could only be experienced–together–at the specific time and place.

And I learned a bit about the particular challenges of life size (larger than life size in this case), outdoor, Augmented Reality.

I was surprised how well the AR worked.  The large target far from the camera worked as well or better than small versions in the lab.  The outdoor lighting didn’t seem to be a big problem, though obviously there are lot’s of conditions that will fail.

On the other hand, it was difficult to test, since the site was not under our control, and wrangling the rig was not trivial. So we had only one actual test of the final product, with no chance to iterate.  Fortunately, it worked well enough we didn’t need to iterate.

We also found a number of technical problems we need to understand, such as how to map the virtual geometry to a complex setting in the real world.  More on these issues later.

I should note that Joel Steinfeldt of the University Public Affairs Office was the key organizer who made it all happen.  This project was a collaboration of many departments at the UI, and had a really tight schedule (with a very immovable deadline), so many things had to come together just right to get enough working to be useful. Joel was essential to this process:  well done!

HASTAC 2013, Toronto

Just back from HASTAC 2013 in Toronto (http://hastack2013.org)

I was only there for one day (Saturday), so I can’t talk about the whole conference.

HASTAC is heavy with digital humanities, especially media studies topics.  This isn’t really my stuff, so a little bit goes a long way for me.  I hope I was not excessively rude when my interest and patience wandered.

I went to this conference under the banner of the Champaign Urbana Community Fab Lab, encouraged and supported by the Institute for Computing in the Humanities Arts and Social Science I-CHASS, part of the Illinois Informatics Institute at the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign.

At the conference, I visited and chatted at the joint exhibit by several Canadian makerspaces. We exchanged secret “maker” handshakes :-), and showed other people about making and makerspaces. They had several demo projects going on the table, including the archetypical activities such as “make a 3D sculpture of your face, using kinnect scanner and a 3D print” (go to any maker space, you’ll see this), and the Makey-Makey “banana keyboard” kit (also to be seen at practically any makerspace).

I also encountered several (mainly Canadian) folks who are working to set up or recently have set up maker spaces.  The CUCFL have been in business quite a while now, comparatively, so they had a lot of questions about how to start, and how to succeed. I gave out cards and invited them to contact the CUC Fab Lab..

The reason for going was to present a short paper about the Champaign Urbana Community Fab Lab mainly about how it works and why it is important.  (Abstract)  Of course, the Fab Lab is something you DO, not something you talk about, so it’s kind of irrelevant to give 15 minute presentation about it.

My session also featured a talk by Mark McDayter (Western University) about social reading (Abstract), and Abigail De Kosnik and Andrea Horbinski (UC Berkeley) about analysis of online Fan Fiction, utilizing “big data” style analytics (Abstract).

McDayter discussed computer interfaces to support and encourage “social reading”, in which the readers circulate a shared text, adding annotations as part of a group discussion.  He looked back to 17^th century coffee houses as a model for such shared annotation (paper based), and imagines computer (screen based) versions of texts to do similar readings.  (It was not clear how much of this is realized in software.)

Horbinski discussed their FanData project, which is analyzing archives of Fan Fiction that, in some cases, dates back to the 1990s.  She showed some data which they have assembled about fan fiction related to the X-files TV series and Harry Potter books and movies.  The data is messy and inconsistent, but there is quite a bit to be learned about temporal patterns and social networks in these communities.

At first, I could not see any strong reason why these papers were in a session together.  But, by the end, I figured out that the theme of the session was “digital communities”, and, in fact, digital communities that are direct descendents of important pre-digital communities.

McDayter specifically referred to and discussed the historical precedents for the “social reading” he invoked, and the Q&A discussed other precedents.  Horbinski’s work is clearly about activities and communities that exist off-line and have existed before the internet (though the fans had little way to intereact with each other in most cases). The Q&A wondered about such earlier precedents, such as the Baker Street Irregulars, and many other earlier cases of “fan fiction”.  I would add that telling stories around the campfire undoubtably was a scene for the earliest fan fiction, which an “amateur” story teller would be moved to tell a new story inspired by the “classic” tales told by the pros.

Finally, the Fab Lab and makerspaces hark back to two historic communities, the DIY/craft movements, and earlier artist/mechanics workshops, e.g., of the Renaissance.  The contemporary fab lab or maker space is multidiscipline and not purpose built (i.e., it is not a factory or lab dedicated to a specific mission), the participants are multi-generational and non-professional, the techniques are eclectic, including “art”, “science”, “high technology” and “business”, among other categories.

So, the program committee juxtaposed three apparently different “digital communities”, with some provocative similarities.  Kudos to perceptive insight of the unnamed, shadowy powers of HASTAC!

So, what might be learned from this juxtaposition?  Looking at the digital fabrication labs, there are a number of interesting points to note.

For one, there is a lot of “fan fabrication” that happens in makerspaces.  There are technological fads, of course.  Makers and Fabbers have their own fan space of tools and technologies that insiders are familiar with and can discuss in detail.  (E.g., Arduinos and Raspberry Pis, Makerbots, and so on.)  But they also use the techniques to realize “Fan Fiction”.  In our lab, we have seen many projects that lovingly recreate Star Trek artifacts and Tardises, and other popular fictional universes.  Note that the digital plans for these creations can, in principle, but published as a form of “fan fiction”, enabling others to remix them in their own labs. In the future, the FanData may be able to include digital traces of these non-digital artifacts.

The digital design tools used in makerspaces and fab labs open the way to “social design”, akin to “social reading”.  The fab lab is a community workspace in many senses, including a very real social community who “make things together”.  The digital design tools make the sharing not only easier, but enable the direct sharing of knowledge, in the form of executable plans for making.  But, to date, we have no good genre or form of text, digital or otherwise, for representing or conducting these conversations about design, making, remaking, criticizing, revising, etc., of physical objects.  This would be a very interesting topic to develop.

In other sessions, I saw two talks by colleague and sensei,  Alan Craig.  One was a standard spiel about XSEDE, specifically how humanities folks can use HPC resources (hint: contact Alan). (Abstract) The second was a short version of his stump speech about Physical and Virtual (Abstract). Also, see Alan’s forthcoming book, Understanding Augmented Reality (recommended).

Gripes.

As usual, there was discussionabout tenure processes, i.e., only books and articles count toward tenure and promotion, which makes it difficult for digital and media scholarship to thrive.  As one of the 99+% who has never been eligible for tenure, I don’t consider this the most important problem in the world.

The conference was terribly set up, with the (not especially great) hotel located (in noisy and snarled) downtown and the meetings at York U., which is a 30-minute bus ride.  With shuttles only available in the morning and after dinner, we were locked into the conference for the whole day.   No food, no restaurants, and no way to leave. Not really the right way to do it.