Correction: We said that Sony’s EyePet for Playstation requires cards to play around the screen but it only needs cards to detect in-game features/objects.
Last year the Georgia Tech Augmented Environments Lab unveiled an augmented reality pet for the iPhone. Georgia Tech’s virtual puppy will run around your iPhone’s screen but it depends on a physical marker being placed on a table or floor. But imagine if you didn’t need any markers or cards, imagine if your mobile-based virtual pet could appear anywhere, similar to Sony’s EyePet for Playstation.
As you can see from the video above a South Korean company called Zenitum has impressively managed to create a mobile augemted reality pet system that isn’t reliant on markers. The iKat is still a prototype app but the video proves that it works really well. We’ve dug around and this looks like the first serious mobile augmented reality pet that doesn’t rely on cards or markers being placed on a table or on the floor.
From Zenitum’s YouTube page: “Based on Zenitum’s D-Track engine, we are working on markerless mobile augmented reality application, iKat. You are breeding a virtual kitten on the phone. The kitten can be mixed into real world using AR. Since no markers or image targets are needed, you need to recognize the space in front of the camera for creating the appropriate space for your kitten.”
In another video (below) Zenitum shows off how its D-Track engine works. You can see the D-Track software scanning the area and then cleverly placing an augmented reality figure on top of a keyboard.
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