Videogame + Toy Theatre?

There's a whole burgeoning world of augmented reality technology and new ways to interface with computers these days. As you've read about here so far, there's Johnny Lee's Wii white board, the Reactable collaborative musical instrument, and the amazing 3-D rotating textured stage in the Cirque du Soleil show, KA in Vegas. What do all of these have in common? Tracking.

This morning I found this video of levelhead, an installation game where the player's only interface is one or more plastic cubes on a pedestal. The game itself and the player are shown on a projected screen, and the sides of the cubes are replaced by tiny virtual rooms with a little avatar.

Yesterday I went to a Dorkbot event where we learned about RoboRealm, a free Windows toolkit for adding Computer Vision to your projects. It takes care of a lot of the complicated linear algebra and programming for you, essentially turning your webcam into an eye for your robot, a tracker for your interactive art piece, or whatever you can come up with. There are modules to send data out to your own electronics or robotics kit or your own software.

Besides this kit, there is the software library used in levelhead called OSGArt. Lots of other tools out there too.