Chunk Generosity Diorama revealed with Moo Vision

Ben & Jerry’s “Moo Vision” has now been available for two weeks (via iTunes), and its been great to see the reaction.  Here are some quotes, movie poster style:

“a must try for ice cream fans” - Augmented Planet

“Ben & Jerry’s iPhone App Gets Even More Psychedelic with Augmented Reality” – Mashable

“Ben & Jerry’s is now the first major brand to sport natural feature tracking on the iPhone” – ReadWriteWeb

I was thrilled to be involved in developing the first 3rd-party iPhone app to use matio’s Unifeye Mobile SDK, and working with Circ.us, Edelman, and metaio was fantastic.  But even better is knowing that we’ve only scratched the surface of what’s possible, and I can’t wait to see what else comes along and to get involved in making it happen.

The project had some interesting challenges.  The Unifeye SDK performs natural feature tracking (NFT), which means that it is able to track 2D images that aren’t limited to black & white blocky markers.  In the ideal case when using NFT, you’ll have control over the target image to be recognized and tracked, so that you can optimize the image for track-ability by the vision system.  For this app, the target images were Ben & Jerry’s pint lids, so we very well couldn’t ask them to reprint them!  Also, pint lids are circular and AR libraries generally tend to deal with rectangular images. Therefore, the tracking configuration went through several iterations to get a result that tracked well under various lighting conditions and camera angles. Major kudos to Stefan Misslinger at metaio and his engineering team in Germany for their fantastic support and tweaks to the SDK.

Here’s a video of the app in action (with editing by the multi-talented Paul Jannicola):