[opensource-dev] Snowglobe as an mixed reality platform

[Kantonen Tuomas]

Hello,

I've been working on a project using Second Life as a platform to 
develop mixed reality teleconferencing/-collaboration system. A brief 
intro about the project can be found at
http://www.vtt.fi/multimedia/projects/mrconference.html
and a video demo of our work so far is at 
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DNB0_c-5TSk .

The project, continuing also in 2010, is split into two parts: 
overlaying a video image with avatars and virtual objects (augmented 
reality; AR) and using hand and head gestures to control avatars and 
interact with virtual objects (augmented virtuality; AV).

We have agreed to release our work as open source. However, lack of 
continuous "forward porting" would soon render the released code
unusable. It would therefore be better to have some parts of our
work incorporated into the Snowglobe sources.

I've tried to keep all our modifications as small as possible. The 
project is separated to our own ACME (Augmented Collaboration in Mixed
Environments) module, vanilla Snowglobe code and an interface between 
the two. 

I'd be ready to invest some time to implement a generic AR/AV support
for Snowglobe if we could come up with a design that could be accepted
by the Snowglobe developers. This would allow anyone to use Snowglobe
as AR/AV research platform, with or without our software.

--
- Tuomas Kantonen, VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland