'Pinch-and-paste' app boosts your interior design skills

[Nipuna]

Paul Marks, senior technology correspondent

(Image: Tulcarion/Getty)

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Ever idly wondered what your kitten would look like if it had your hairstyle? Or what your living room would look like with a tiger-print shag-pile carpet? An augmented reality app will one day let you visualise such things on tablets or phones in an interesting way: you'll simply "pinch" the texture you want from an image on a touchscreen and paste it onto a photo of the target.

It's the work of Kiyoshi Kiyokawa at Osaka University in Japan and colleagues, who demonstrated their system - called "pinch-n-paste" - at the Virtual Reality Software and Technology (VRST 2012) conference in Toronto, Canada, last week. Their work-in-progress system computes how the 3D texture pixels (or "texels") should wrap around the shape of the target 3D surface and then maps them onto it.

"In the case of interior design, a user could grab a texture from a real chair in a room and paste it to an image of a sofa to see how the newly covered sofa suits the room," Kiyokawa says.

Pinch-n-Paste in action (Image: Kiyoshi Kiyokawa, Osaka University)

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"We aim to be able to change any real object's appearance by sampling another real or virtual object's colour, texture, shape and so on, and move, delete, duplicate them as if they are virtual," he says. Combined with a head-mounted display - like Google Glasses - it will feel like "your own tailored world is real".

But what about my pasting my bouffant onto my cat? "Technically it's much more challenging, as cats are difficult to track. But it is along our research direction," Kiyoshi says.