Scary or cool? This technology developed by a team of researchers at Technische Universität Ilmenau in Germany is probably both. Their so-called “Diminished Reality” system makes it possible to manipulate video in real-time. As opposed to Augmented Reality, which adds virtual objects to real world images, Diminished Reality removes selected objects from video recordings.

The way it works is that first, the object to be eliminated from the footage has to be specified and detected. After that, the system analyzes the immediate surroundings of the object, for example the look of a table it was standing on, and fills out the empty space with that information.

According to the researchers behind this Diminished Reality application, this process just takes a few milliseconds and works both for video streams and static pictures.

This pretty impressive video provides more insight:

Via Chip [GER]