The technology has been used in Edinburgh, to create a city guide, allowing people to find virtual artworks using their mobile phone.
“Its about using a camera phone as a magic wand” said Dr Mark Wright of the Division of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh.
The Spellbinder project uses a database of all places that participants have added data to. People query it by taking a snap of a location with their phone then use multimedia messaging to send the picture to Spellbinder. Powerful image-matching algorithms are used to analyse the image that can deal with pictures of the same place being taken under different light conditions or from different angles.
Once Spellbinder has worked out the location of an image it consults the database and sends back an image with the extra ‘hidden art’ added to it.
Virtual Games
Previous projects to augment the real world with digital content used barcodes on objects or a software download that participants installed on their phones.
But barcodes required someone to go out to label everything, Dr Wright said, and software can be hard to maintain and tweak for every possible handset that could use it.
The first use of the system has been in an Invisible Art project set in Edinburgh. This, said Dr Wright, encouraged people to explore the city and take snaps of landmarks to see whether others had added anything to them.
A game has also been developed using the system in which players wear a large individual image on their body and are given a “base” or location to protect.
Points are given for shooting snaps of the images on rival players’ clothes or of their base.
Although Spellbinder has been used to spot locations it could, said Dr Wright, be used to match almost anything.
“With Spellbinder, the real world becomes a computational resource” he said.
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[Source: The UK Mobile Phone Blog]
