Today we received the visit of Deutsche Welle TV, from Berlin.
They are preparing a report about "Soccer & Science", and MICC Lab has a lot to say with the work of Marco Bertini, Walter Nunziati and Carlo Torniai about video understanding of soccer events.
After playing the "spectator" part for a while, me, Lea and Alessandro had the chance to show the interactive table with wikiWall running on it.
The
lightning conditions were bad.. (you know how much a vision system is in-tolerant about that), but in the end the result was good and fun.
We’ll tune on DW Tv and see how italian research is described..

Two papers about the wikiWall project have been accepted, the first is for ICME06 and the second is for Vision For HCI Workshop of CVPR06.

Next.. i will try also for the 2nd Concept Mapping Conference..

In general i think mixed/augmented reality applications that inherit the virtual reality concept of googles and mix it with the absolute user tracking have drawbacks in terms of usability.
I stumbled in the Mixed Reality Interface (MRI), no more a research project but a ready-to-buy device that implements the mixed reality paradigm in a clever way, i mean:

• you don’t have to wear googles, the interface is presented on a screen (LCD in this case)
• the interaction metaphor is entirely tabletop, you manipulate tangible objects on the surface and have their digital counterparts move/rotate in the artificial scene
• i like the concept of the "point of view", or "user", object that moves the camera

MRI is "just" a device (the right choice), but in general, the shown applications are also very nice: smooth animations when an object is put on the surface or disappears, no jittering, and photorealistic rendering (this is good for anything dealing with "reality").
Techwise, it seems this device is vision-based (they say illumination changes can cause problems), no detail on the tracker identification system.
The company is Kommerz, there are a bunch of interesting videos on their site.