HideOut: games with augmented reality

Game tags in visible (left) and infrared light (right)

Engineers from the Pittsburgh Research and Development Center Disney Research have developed a new game concept HideOut . The concept involves the construction of augmented reality with the help of a projector and a digital camera. The digital camera reads infrared command markers from the playing field, and the projector builds the programmed images in accordance with the commands.

The description sounds tricky, but in reality you can create whole worlds with moving pictures in the projector's beam. It can be both board games and "interactive" books.


A virtual person passes through the white line, but cannot pass through the wall (prohibiting infrared marker)
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As you might guess, Disney primarily relies on a children's audience, but adult managers can use the augmented reality projector for presentations.



For a technical description of the HideOut concept, see Willis, KDD, Shiratori, T., Mahler, M.. HideOut: Mobile Projector Interaction with Tangible Objects and Surfaces. In Proc. ACM TEI (2013) .