Once again its been too long since I had time to blog. Recently my student Fadi Chehimi and I have been working on the revisions of our paper “Augmented Reality 3D Interactive Advertisements on Smartphones” that was accepted for ICMB 07 and I thought its now a good time to share details of the project.

In this project we have developed a unique system that will allow complex and highly interactive visual 3-D adverts to be viewed on mobile phones equipped with a camera using a visual marker. In this system the user ‘selects’ s tag with his camera phone running the associated S60 AR software, termed ARMAD (Augmented Reality Mobile Advertisements), then download and ultimately superimpose 3-D model(s)/information on the location of the tag on screen.

In order to view and manipulate 3-D models on screen the user simply has to rotate around the tag, if it is fixed, or rotate the tag, if it is mobile. The products/info in the content of the ad will then be displayed from all angles as below.

Users can also zoom in/out of the model by moving their phone closer to or further away from the tag, but keeping it within the boundary of the screen.

Currently the tags we have designed are a bit on the large side but we are hoping we can perfect them to a smaller size and improve the flexibility of the software.

Obviously, advertisements are but one application for this type of Augmented Reality and you could imagine lots of applications for games, tourist information, etc.