Bokode Owl

This is a mysterious owl with a tiny built-in projector inside its eyes.
When you focus the lens just past infinity, an AR marker appears floating in midair.
The tiny marker, printed onto a sheet of printing-plate film, is projected through a hand-made lens (an acrylic ball cut in half and polished) — but to the naked eye or an ordinary camera, it just looks like a plain LED.

This technique applies Bokode (‘boke’ + ‘code’), presented by MIT Media Lab's Camera Culture Group at ACM SIGGRAPH in 2009, to the art of AR.

Materials: wool felt, LED, printing-plate film, custom lens, AR recognition system