Gear your mind with Augmented Reality Sandbox

The Augmented Reality Sandbox was designed to be used as a hands-on presentation in science centres and museums with least guidance and it teaches geographic, geologic, and hydrologic concepts. It can be created by using a 3D camera and a digital projector and can connect a real sandbox with virtual topography and water. Users create topography ideals by developing real sand. As visitors are of any age they can go to see about their terraforming, a projector throws a magnetic topographic map on top of it all, updating outline and elevation colours in real time and Play, interest, and self-driven learning are all elated by this. "It is a better way to teach your children how topographic contour lines work, or how water flows over a scene than building whatever region you can imagine and then seeing the contours and the water react in real time to any changes you make."

In actual time, scanned the sand surface by a computer from a camera overhead, and then an altitude colour map, topographic shape lines, and simulated water emerge based on the surface below. A Kinect camera positioned above the sandbox tracks the physical activity under.

The fun part of AR sandbox: The virtual rainstorm, which is supplied by the projector, sends a flow of blue water pouring down into the mountains, providing flow and watershed on the landscape created moments. Visitors are interested to explore the material of sandbox, they are excited to see the 3d landforms which are expressed on 2d maps and the flowing of water through a watershed.

There is YouTube video from a group of Czech researchers, researchers at UC Davis' W. M. Keck Center for Active Visualization in the Earth Sciences (KeckCAVES) who Motivated, they started work on their augmented-reality sandbox in early 2012, as part of a National Science Foundation-funded program focused on water system education. Last summer, the video, showing off their prototype, garnered over a million views on YouTube below is the link to that video:

About a magic sandbox:

It's a sandbox that allows kids mold its contents, then makes that area to live.

It looks pretty excellent in daytime conditions!

The principle of the magic sandbox is as follow:

there is a Kinect sensor who checks the level of the sand and that send it to a laptop or desktop then the laptop controls the output by the projector hovering over and projects colours to sand which is depending on the height.

"This sandbox is modified from the SArndbox project developed at UC Davis which has additional information on the Kinect/Projector assembly and advice. Magic Sand was modified to be a framework for developing games."

Adaptation of Fish in the sandbox:

By the sandbox, we can play with fish in a little game. So many fishes are created and the player can help them to reach their mothers by emptying flowing rivers in the sand or constructing mountains.

Materials used to make sandbox:

For making a sandbox basically, need a conventional home projector, a Kinect sensor for Xbox 360, some wood, L-angles, bolts and nuts and the most important thing sand.

To make a sandbox the home projector is expensive otherwise, the sandbox was really cheap to create. following materials are used:

1. Sand:

We need about 12 kg of sand. We can use a regular sand that and if you want two brands of inside play sands: dynamic sand and sand alive.

Kinetic sand ( kinetic sand does not stick to other materials and surfaces and does not dry out) is really great for this application. Sand alive is whiter and behaves very differently from real sand.And everyone loves to play with sands and users experience by holding the sand inside the box.

2. Table:

The sandbox will be adjusted on top of the table in such a way that it can be removed. This table is just the right height for a sandbox and its small width will keep the projector not too high above the table top.

3. Kinect:

Kinect is a line of motion sensing input devices that was produced by Microsoft for Xbox 360. The first step was to prepare the Kinect sensor since

4. Projector:

You can use regarding any home projector that you like as long as it is sufficiently bright and its throw ratio is less than 3 (otherwise the projector ends up really high above the table).

Its an awesome AR technology! So many augmented reality development companies also using this AR sandbox method for preparing games/application for the children. Creatiosoft is already getting ideas for this applications. For e.g. how cool would it be to demonstrate traffic flow or crowd flow simulations using this concept? Simple and Ingenious!!!

Conclusion:

The particular purpose of this AR sandbox is to teach kids or children about topography and water systems all that bleeding-edge tech couldn't come close to capturing the sandbox's instant, accessible magic. And since the Kinect can pick up any object placed inside the sandbox, there are some possibilities for a play that extends beyond pure terrain building.