Making a virtual flood in the UC Davis #AugmentedReality sandbox. #EarthDay #scifest #nsfsuperscience
The augmented reality sandbox is pretty great. People can sculpt mountains, canyons or rivers, then fill them with water or even create erupting volcanoes.
The 3D visualization tool was built using off-the-shelf parts and good ol’ playground sand. Any shape made in the sandbox is detected by an Xbox Kinect sensor and processed with open source software. It is then projected as a color-coded contour map onto the sand.
This version of the device at UCLA was built by Gary Glesener:
















