Augmented Reality Brings a Shadowy Fantasy Land to Life

For her master's thesis at Parsons, designer and programmer Joon Moon created "Augmented Shadow," a "fantasy ecosystem" rendered on an augmented reality tabletop.

Users interact with the project using blocks, which are followed by realistic, shadowy animations of houses. These appear to emanate from a single source of light--but are actually projected from overhead. Then things get interesting: As the shadows touch, they set off a series of interactions, in what Moon calls a "fantasy ecosystem."

As you can see from the video, trees grow up around light, and the animated characters take chunks of light to bring life to their homes:

Brilliant stuff. We've seen lots of AR games and such, but few have layered so much fantasy and story telling into such a simple, elegant interface.