Have you ever wanted to augment your reality?  Today our team went to the Queen’s University Integrated Learning Center to see a demo of Augmented Reality Pool.This is a project being worked on by one of our mentors who helped with programming and vision code this past season.  He wanted to show us that some of the same techniques that our team used are being used by researchers in computer vision in other areas too.We had a brief tour of the ILC, and learned about what goes on in the building.  Many of us have been there before for Science Quest, or for our FLL practice tournament a few years ago.  There is usually NOT a big tent set up in the computer area though.  This is a special demo set up for A.R. Pool.It needs to be under a tent to control the lighting on the pool table.  There are cameras and a projector involved in the game, so lighting is very important.  The cameras are supposed to detect where the balls are, and where the cue is, and the projector will then trace lines showing where the balls will travel after they are hit at a specific angle.Unfortunately, when we arrived for our tour and demo, there were a few technical issues.  The camera settings were off….…so those got changed….…and then the lengthy calibration process had to happen.We know all about calibration.  It is such an important step in making any system function well.  We had days of calibration in the warehouse before our robot was shooting well.

Although we didn’t see any A.R. Pool today, we have been invited to come back tomorrow to try again.  We definitely got a better appreciation of the calibration process though!