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Smart Kitchen: Enhancing Kitchen Activitities

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How can we show the added value of computer vision in an environment that people visit often? That was the task for the internship project of Brian Diephuis and you can see the result in this YouTube movie.

During his design process Brian managed to work out a lot of different possibilities and even tested some of them, like the vegetable recognizer. Eventually the decision was made to focus on the kitchen environment and to see what would be possible with a computer vision enhanced kitchen. In the demonstration video below you can see some interesting examples. By detecting several different objects on the kitchen counter the system can provide all sorts of information about the current state and give you suggestions and even show you where useful kitchen utensils are located. Although Brian’s internship has finished some time back we wanted to share the result of his work in this YouTube movie.

 

Magic book: Digital storytelling goes physical

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Our latest project: The magic book is an interactive installation that enables you to read a digital book without losing the qualities that a normal physical book has. A camera with computer vision software detects the book’s position and a projector shows the appropriate animation to tell a digital story. In this way every blank book can become an animated interactive story that you can flip through and hold in your hands.

The magic book is intended as an installation that can provide visitors to museum information or to flip through the introduction of any book in a library. It can also be used to tell children a story in waiting rooms or playing areas for instance. The installation uses advanced computer vision algorithms to detect the books position and orientation to be able to project the right visuals on top of it. Still the end result has the simplicity of a normal book and can be experienced as such.

The webcam is pointed at the book and feeds images to the computer vision system. This system interprets the location and orientation of the book and then calculates the projection. The projector will then make the story appear on the book as if it was really on paper.

 

Augmented Reality Blackjack

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At Studio diip, we developed a real-time Blackjack scoring assistant that shows your current score next to your cards. By recognizing playing cards on a table with a top down camera, this system can determine the score for each player and project this around cards. A demonstration of the system can bee seen in the YouTube video.

With our already established expertise in the area of playing card recognition we were able to quickly build a system that is specifically suited for use in Blackjack. By looking for specific card shapes and using learning algorithms for the card’s index number the score is determined for each card. These are then added up and displayed next to the card by using a top down projector. In this way we “augment” the table cloth around the cards with information.

For now the system shows the resulting score for each player, but with the identity of each card known it can be extended relatively easy for other purposes. An example of this is showing the chance that a player goes bust when taking another card for teaching purposes or detecting cheating. The system is not limited to just projectors to show the score, imagine the possibilities of combining this detection with a technology like Google Glass.

Blackjack Augmented Reality