They say sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, which makes digital interaction artist Cyril Diagne’s tech demo pretty magical.

Today he uploaded a video showing how you can copy real-life objects from your environment and paste them into Photoshop on your desktop, merely by pointing your phone.

Of course, even when you understand what is going on, the technology itself remains pretty impressive.

In the demo Cyril combined augmented reality and AI, using BASNet  AI microservice for object detection and background removal, allowing him to create a clear object from the photo captured by his phone, which then uses the OpenCV SIFT algorithm to find where on the screen he is pointing the camera by comparing a screenshot of the screen with the field of view of the phone camera to derive and X-Y coordinate to paste the image into photoshop, using a local server running on the laptop.

If you still find this rather hard to believe, Diagne, who is doing an art residency at Google,  has made the code available on GitHub to try yourself.

One can, of course, imagine this feature easily showing up on the Microsoft HoloLens, and I am sure it will not be long before someone with HoloLens posts a similar demo.

Check out the project at Github here and see some more of his demos below:

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