A topic that I've always kept my eye on, Augmented Reality is a concept where you apply computer generated objects and map them onto real live footage. Not overlaying video, but generating the graphics in real time right along side of the live feed. It may look simple up front, but when you start to think about how it's done, it's quite fascinating.

Here's the setup, you put yourself on a camera, you feed the video into your computer, you place a piece of recognizable structure in the camera's field of view, and then the computer recognizes those structures and draws objects on them.

These guys accomplish this and let you take part by offering a Flash Video based solution..

Watch the video from the website:

Papervision - Augmented Reality (extended) from dpinteractive on Vimeo.

The two fantastic implementations of this are...

Children's Books:

Video Games:

levelHead v1.0, 3 cube speed-run (spoiler!) from Julian Oliver on Vimeo.

It'll be an interesting field to watch... and I may toy with it myself, add it to the list of stuff I want to know more about (keeps getting larger and larger).

Read the complete post at http://www.thoughtstoblog.com/articles/2008/11/20/augmented-reality