Wayne D's Blog

One of the people I follow on twitter pointed me to LivingSasquatch.com. If you have a webcam, a laser printer and patience you can try out this Flash based augmented reality site. Print out the foot print, point your webcam at the footprint and if things are just right an image of a sasquatch will be overlaid on your webcam image. You can sequence six actions along with text bubbles from 30 pregenerated actions including emotions, movement and fighting moves. One of my sons put together a short movie of the sasquatch attacking a plastic cup.

My low quality webcam made getting the sasquatch to appear stable quite a chore, the lighting needed to be just right, the camera angle that works best was hard to maintain and the text bubble doesn't point towards the camera. This makes getting what you want pretty fiddly especially if you don't have a lot of patience and a small tripod handy.

Now here is where the problem starts, although you can save your short movie on the sasquatch site you cant download it, embed it otherwise or share it with your friends other than through a link to the page. Your augmented reality creation is stuck in the walled garden set up by the beef jerky company sponsoring the site. I expect the beef jerky guys don't want people doing rude things with their sasquatch but if they really want him to go viral they have to loosen the iron fist.

One other thing that would be great for version 2 is a walking animation that would be triggered by moving the target footprint. EEEPC 701 users, when I tried to load the site on my EEEPC the hard drive light came on solid, I guess 512M isn't enough.