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The theme of last night’s session was Augmented Reality (AR) - Our Flash-head extraordinaire, Gaming Dave introduced the session by presenting a lovely piece of work produced for US energy giant GE.

The Tinnovation crew check out ecomagination!

The great thing about GE’s Ecomagination is that it is built entirely in Flash, utilising one of our current favourite plugins Papervision3D

A print mark is downloaded and printed, held up to the web cam on the computer running the app and then as if by magic a virtual world builds before your very eyes!

As the mark is moved around, left to right, near and far from the camera, the 3D model seemlessly angles and scales in line with position, creating the illusion it really has come right out the paper.

Check out Ecomagination here: http://ge.ecomagination.com/

We looked at other examples online including a great standalone app from Toyota available here.

Know any more? Let us know via a comment at the bottom of this blog!

So, moving on to the fun bit, what could we do with AR? Ideas thrown about included:

Virtual (or should that be Augmented!?) Ronnie Wood
Using some of we Ronnie footage we shot for RonnieWood.com build an app similar to Ecomagination that actually puts Ronnie on your “real world” desktop playing you a tune. Create the print mark, place it on your desk in view of your webcam and watch Ronnie magically appear out of your desk!

With multiple animations or instances of the animations running at the same time you could even build an augmented Rock Band!. Tie in some nice audio mixing and create a track right in front of your eyes!

Tank Battle
Using two print marks and models, create a version of the old school tank battle game. Position and angle your tank via the print mark then use the space bar to gauge the power of your shot.

Tetris
3D blocks fall from the sky rotate the print mark to rotate the block.

Puzzle Slider
Video or picture floats in the sky and by using the print mark you can move the blank space around to  complete the puzzle.

IKEA
Using photos or live cam feed of your room drop furniture in situ to see what it would look like in your house.

Tinnovation’s Nubbin
Have a cartoon cut-out style or a 3D nubbin walk on your desktop.

Got any good ideas for AR? Drop us a comment below!