And now, X ray vision
remember the superhero from Krypton? His amazing x-ray vision is no longer restricted to comic-book imagination.
Kiriakos Kutulakos, computer scientist at University of Rochestor in New York, usa, and student James Vallino have transformed pulp science fiction to reality. Called augmented reality, the technique enables a person to automatically access a three-dimensional object over live video.
A builder, for instance, could go into a room with a headset on and see the plan of the buried ducts carrying electric wirings and pipes superimposed on his/her view of the wall.
This, the developers claim, will greatly reduce the danger of workers inadvertently electrocuting or blowing themselves up by cutting a power line or a gas pipe while drilling through walls.
The technique can also prove to be of immense help to surgeons. They could superimpose an x-ray image over their view of a patient as they operate. This will allow them to see through the flesh and bone as they cut without looking away from the operating table to check x-ray reports.
The main challenge before the creators of the technique was aligning the computer-generated x-ray images with the real world. Kutulakos and Vallino solved the problem by keeping the two images in register by relating the computer-generated image to four predetermined benchmarks.
"Once you have the landmarks and have determined the relative position of the graphical model with respect to them, all that is required is to position the overlay so as to track these landmarks from frame to frame,' Kutulakos explained.
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