* Astronomy

Researchers from Georgia Tech have devised methods to take real-time, real-world information and integrating it onto Google Earth, adding deep dynamic data to the previously sterile Googlescape, using live video feeds from many angles to find the position and motion of various objects, which they then combine with behavioural simulations to produce real-time animations for Google Earth or Microsoft Virtual Earth. Weather, birds, and following rivers will follow soon.

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Reconstruct Mars automatically in minutes!
A computer system is under development that can automatically combine images of the Martian surface, captured by landers or rovers, in order to reproduce a three dimensional view of the red planet. The resulting model can be viewed from any angle, giving astronomers a realistic and immersive impression of the landscape. This important new development was presented at the European Planetary Science Congress in Potsdam by Dr Michal Havlena on Tuesday 15 September.

"The feeling of 'being right there' will give scientists a much better understanding of the images. The only input we need are the captured raw images and the internal camera calibration. After minutes of computation on a standard PC, a three dimensional model of the captured scene is obtained" - Dr Michal Havlena.

The growing amount of available imagery from Mars makes the manual image processing techniques used so far nearly impossible to handle. The new automated method which allows fast high quality image processing, was developed at the Centre for Machine Perception of the Technical University of Prague, under the supervision of Tomas Pajdla, as a part of the EU FP7 Project PRoVisG.
From the technical point of view, the image processing consists of three stages: the first step is determining the image order. If the input images are unordered, i.e. they do not form a sequence but still are somehow connected, a state-of-the-art image indexing technique is able to find images of cameras observing the same part of the scene. To start with, up to a thousand features on each image are detected and 'translated' into visual words, according to a visual vocabulary trained on images from Mars. Then, starting from an arbitrary image, the following image is selected as such if it shares the highest number of visual words with the previous image.
The second step of the pipeline, the so-called 'structure-from-motion computation,' helps scientists determine the accurate camera positions and rotations in three dimensional space. To do this for each image pair representing neighbouring frames, it is enough to find 5 corresponding features to obtain a relative camera pose between the two images.
The last and most important step is the so-called 'dense 3D model generation' of the captured scene, which essentially creates and fuses the Martian surface depth maps. To do, this the model uses the intensity disparities (parallaxes) present in images taken at two distinct camera positions, which were identified in the second step.

"The pipeline has already been used successfully to reconstruct a three dimensional model from nine images captured by the Phoenix Mars Lander, which were obtained just after performing some digging operation on the Mars surface. The challenge is now to reconstruct larger parts of the surface of the red planet, captured by the Mars Exploration Rovers Spirit and Opportunity" - Dr Michal Havlena.

Source: European Planetology Network

Augmented Reality on the iPhone
The Pocket Universe virtual sky offers augmented reality with the use of Layers.

Up to now virtual reality has proved cumbersome as a design tool, but European researchers are finalising a system that brings virtuality to the wider world.
Virtual reality (VR) is a powerful tool, but its true potential remains unrealised. Applications mixing the virtual and real worlds, called mixed or augmented reality (AR), are weak. There are few, reliable systems, and what exists are very expensive. Collaboration is limited and still relatively unsophisticated. And the state of the art is anchored to the desktop or multi-tiled, or multi-screen, displays. Both are fixed solutions.

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