Augmented Reality Sandbox Displays Virtual Water Flowing Through Grooves You Make in Real Sand

The Augmented Reality Sandbox is a National Science Foundation-funded project at UC Davis which uses Kinect to simulate real time water which flows through the grooves you make in the actual sandbox. It's an awesome demonstration of augmented reality for use in a simulation, and it's also just cool. Watch:

Read more about the project here. The site explanation is pretty heavy reading for a non-technical audience, but this is basically how it works:

There's a Kinect camera positioned above a real sandbox, which records the sand's surface data (filtering out non-sandbox data like hands and shovels). A program then converts that data into a topographic 3D map, which is then displayed on top of the real sandbox. A water flow simulation which runs according to mathematical equations that govern fluid flow is then displayed on the 3D map. And so as a result, whenever grooves and holes are carved into the actual sandbox, water will appear, and act in a realistic way.

Video via Reddit.

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Comments

[shockwave yareach]

Groovy!

(can't believe nobody else thought of saying that...)