Every great magic trick consists of three parts or acts. The first part is called “The Pledge”. The magician shows you something ordinary: a deck of cards, a bird or a man. He shows you this object. Perhaps he asks you to inspect it to see if it is indeed real, unaltered, normal. But of course… it probably isn’t. The second act is called “The Turn”. The magician takes the ordinary something and makes it do something extraordinary. Now you’re looking for the secret… but you won’t find it, because of course you’re not really looking. You don’t really want to know. You want to be fooled. But you wouldn’t clap yet. Because making something disappear isn’t enough; you have to bring it back. That’s why every magic trick has a third act, the hardest part, the part we call “The Prestige”

From the movie “The Prestige”

I had that feeling when I read an article about Augmented Reality which I haven’t heard of before.

The article mentioned a page developed by General Electric as an example

I went directly to the video and my eyes and mouth were wide open for 5 minutes until I realized what it is

Here is another video showing the “making” …

http://www.gotoandlearn.com/play?id=105

And now after being “enlightened” , I can tell the “trick”

We all know that we can render 3D graphics and change the viewpoint by changing the position (x, y, and z) of the camera object

We also know that with computer vision, we can detect the position and the rotation of a certain pattern on all axis

Combining the two concepts, we can use the computer camera to detect the position of the viewer (the human) relative to the position and rotation of the pattern and then render the 3D graphics respectively

So simple isn’t it, but yet amazing