Welcome to the official homepage of the Hand of god (HOG) project. HOG is a research project worked on by Aaron Stafford. This research is being conducted in the Wearable Computer Lab in the School of CIS which is located at the Mawson Lakes campus of the University of South Australia.

HOG is the name given to this project because outdoor Augemented Reality (AR) users of the system have the experience of seeing a giant hand come out of the sky. The experience of these users is similar to the experience of the people in the mini series "The Stand" by Stephen King, where the "hand of god" comes out of the sky and lifts up a nuclear warhead. It is also similar to the interaction method many gamers have experienced while playing computer games such as Black and White and Populous. In both of these god games players interact with the world through the "hand of god".

Indoor users use their hands and other physical props on the HOG table as seen in the picture on the right at the top. Physical objects on or above the table surface are continuously captured by a number of cameras placed around the edge of the table looking in. The captured information is sent to people working outdoors equipped with an AR system such as Tinmith (image on right in middle). People working outdoors with an AR system see the scene live from the HOG table and can walk around it as though it is a part of the real world. The image on the bottom right is a screen capture from an outdoor user running the Tinmith system. In this example the indoor user is pointing to a location on the table surface that is of some significance to the person outside. The person outside sees the giant hand come out of the sky to point to an area on the ground in front of them.

The system is broken into two main parts:

• Scene acquisition
• Rendering

[edit] Highlights

• Segment featured on the channel 7 news
• Article published in The Researcher
• Article published in The Helix
• 2nd place in division day best paper award
• Won WWDC scholarship from AUC
• Appeared on 5AA radio with Dave Waterman and Dr Judy Ford
• Appeared on ABC radio with Grant Cameron
• Paper accepted to ISMAR06
• Won AUDF development grant
• Won divisional grant
• Poster accepted into the divisional research day

[edit] More Info

• Images captured from the Tinmith system
• Images of the HOG table
• HOG in the media
• Various short videos of what an outdoor AR user see that were create in 2006

[edit] Supervisors

This project is supervised by Dr Wayne Piekarski and Professor Bruce Thomas.