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Ad Displays 3D Car in Augmented Reality

22

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.

About the Author

Avatar image for Bart Veldhuizen
Bart Veldhuizen

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 Head of Community at Sketchfab.

22 Comments

  1. 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 :(

  2. 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...

  3. Too bad they´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
    GPL´ed (like Blender itself). Just look at

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

    and you´ll start dreaming of incorporating THAT into Blender´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)

  4. 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 ;)

  5. 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.

  6. 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.

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