Ad Displays 3D Car in Augmented Reality

Bart · December 31, 2008

Here’s a *really* nice form of interactive 3D advertising, and it looks like they did the 3D design in Blender.

What appears to be little more than a black and white advertisement in three recent German automotive magazines becomes a 3D holographic model of the Mini Cabrio through a webcam and the Mini website.

The ad works only in IE6 or higher. If you want to try it for yourself, download the PDF of the ad, print it out and head over to the Mini website.

Author Bart

I have a LONG history with Blender - I wrote some of the earliest Blender tutorials, worked for Not a Number and helped run the crowdfunding campaign that open sourced Blender (the first one on the internet!). I founded BlenderNation in 2006 and have been editing it every single day since then ;-) I also run the Blender Artists forum and I'm Community Lead at n8n.

22 responses

Bas Brouwers

31 December 2008 at 11:07

Wow, that was really cool. And it is indeed blender that you see in the ‘making of’ movie. Nice one!

eMirage

31 December 2008 at 11:31

Amazing,

I think that it can be done with the blender game engine, any suggestions !!!?

DingTo

31 December 2008 at 12:51

wow, this is really amazing!

Blender, Blender, Blender! :-)

Smelz

31 December 2008 at 13:43

not to rain on anybodies parade here, but I was thinking. Do you think it’s possible that companies show blender in making of videos because they would have to pay if they displayed another software’s interface?

Regardless this looks awesome, if only it worked on mac :(

Tokka

31 December 2008 at 14:14

After watching the ‘making of’ it seams like they were ‘inspired’ by Julian Olivers ‘Levelhead’ game/code.

http://www.blendernation.com/2007/11/19/levelhead-a-spatial-memory-game/

http://selectparks.net/~julian/levelhead/

Maybe they used Blender because he documented his workflow in making his levdesigns / game ?

Kaveh

31 December 2008 at 15:25

Amazing. Thanks for posting. I don’t have a printer to hand and don’t use IE, but will take a look some time.

Only thing is, they should not use the word “holographic” as this has nothing to do with holography…

wolfram

31 December 2008 at 17:02

Too bad theyÂ´ll force you to use IE6 (I hate it, as it just opens a black hole to SPAM & Trojans on your system :(…), but did you know that the technology behind it is
GPLÂ´ed (like Blender itself). Just look at

http://www.hitl.washington.edu/artoolkit/license.html

and youÂ´ll start dreaming of incorporating THAT into BlenderÂ´s gamekit (Ton, did you listen :-) … ?)

2008 was a very successfull for Blender & its community, so a big THANX to all of you who made it happen ….

and a happy 2009 with even bigger achievements to come …..

All the best from Wolfram (uit Keulen)

cd38

31 December 2008 at 17:41

that’s brilliant.

barbatron

31 December 2008 at 18:09

it’s really nice to see commercial work done in blender.
( that’s all I wanted to say )

andy circus

31 December 2008 at 19:53

I think they might have used artToolKit for this, it’s been
integrated it into panda3d’s engine for a while.

andy circus

31 December 2008 at 19:56

I don’t know if ArtToolKit has been also integrated straight into blender :D

banor

31 December 2008 at 20:28

Pretty cool…haven’t tried it, but sounds cool. :)

LOGAN

31 December 2008 at 21:20

My own test with ARToolkit: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-348666084928691274&hl=en

Bart

1 January 2009 at 15:57

This technology based on Bitmanagement BC Contact VRML/ X3D :) They offering the BS Exporter for Blender (for free) too:
http://www.blendernation.com/2008/12/16/bs-exporter-for-blender-121/

Olm-Z

1 January 2009 at 17:52

If only that ad was for some EV… new technology to sell the old one …
but nice working technical exemple following the video .
we’ll do some other stuff with ARToolkit (and actualy I think its not AT used for this ad, at least it’s the closed source new version they develop http://studierstube.icg.tu-graz.ac.at/handheld_ar/stbtracker.php , or concurent system) ,
Julian Oliver lead the way … (wonder what he has in mind for next piece… )

Jor-Dan

2 January 2009 at 00:02

Wow… I tried loading the pdf in my iphone, and with the brightness all the way down it ran just fine on top of my phone! That was the coolest thing ever ;)

Robert

2 January 2009 at 15:48

Hey Logan how do you do that with artoolkit I’d really love to know.
Quite awsome!

Robert

2 January 2009 at 16:30

Darn it doesnt work on Vista :(

0r10n

2 January 2009 at 17:07

Hi guys,

I’m glad you liked our application and our demo-video.

The company responsible for this advertisement is called metaio and we are a german-based software-development-company with subsidiaries in the US and Korea.

I’m the one resposible for the 3d-Content-Creation, and since I have been using Blender for 8 years now, I’m a little bit biased, when it comes to choose what software to use ;)

If you are interested, please have a look at :
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oHkUOpYNhoM
http://www.metaio.com/media-press/media-gallery/
Most of the models in the Marketing-Section there were modeled and/or animated with Blender.
Since we use VRML as 3D-Format a lot of baking (animations, constraints, textures, shadows, etc.) had to be done in Blender before exporting the final data.

As andy_circus brought up the idea of AR-Toolkit above:
The AR-software we use is called Unifeye. It is our inhouse-developed Augmented-Reality-Software.

If anybody has further questions about the software, the technology or our Blender-worklflow, please just post them here.

Tynach

2 January 2009 at 20:38

Robert, Vista doesn’t work with it.

Get your terminology right ;).

Tynach

4 January 2009 at 22:56

Well, I don’t have a web cam to try this with, so I can’t test it. But either way, I can’t read anything on the site anyway, so I can’t read what to do with the instructions.