Big Screen Augmented Reality not just a gimmick

In the last three years Augmented reality (AR) on the big screen has been developed by artists experimenting with games in public spaces. Artists like Bren O’Callaghan has used the BBC big screens for games like Red Nose Dribble or Chris O’ Shea with Hand From Above.

The public experience it by seeing live images of themselves on the big screen with pre-produced images on top of the reality. In these BBC big screen experiments the public are able to actually interact with and move the computerised images. This turns the street into a full-body Wii game type experience that anyone can play:

"The BBC Big Screen is fitted with a CCTV camera, linked into a computer that runs the software then outputs to the screen," explains O'Shea. "The software picks a person based on their proportions and how apart they are from other people, then tracks the blob over time using optical flow.”

Now a Netherlands Public Service anti-agression campaign has pushed this use of AR into a new realm. The campaign raises awareness of what to do if you witness violence against public service workers such as paramedics. The Dutch government’s centre for public service information, Postbus 51, has put up two giant city centre interactive billboards, one in Amsterdam and one in Rotterdam. The public see themselves live on the screen at the same time as previously shot footage of a staged attack on ambulance drivers as if shot by CCTV cameras. The public experience this as if they are standing right by the attack and doing nothing about it. The screen then displays advice on what they could do to help.

Viral expert Rik Lander, outlines the campaign’s use of AR in his blog Von Viral:

“A great use of live chromakey to make people stop, look and think about the issues. We often thing of AR as dodgy graphics jumpily superimposed on reality. Here they have used a familiar technique to literally place the viewers into the situation the advertisers want them to think about.”