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by Teresa Martin

In the chaos that defines my construction-zone home, I just knocked over two long boxes of baseball cards, sending hundreds of cardboard players from the past decade or so flying across the floor. Nothing else says Spring quite so definitely.

Of course, this Spring the cards are getting a little scary. That's because they are no longer happy to remain as four color printed images on two-dimensional paper. Seriously, the Topps cards are now like something out of Hogwarts. Thanks to a partnership between Topps and a software company called Total Immersion there's a new line of cards that feature walking, throwing, batting three-dimensional avatars.

No, I not making this up. As of this week (PC users) and as of April (Mac users) can turn paper players into a sort of video animation that walks across your desk like something from fiction.

The technology is called augmented reality and it is a process that integrates 3D computer objects into video. When the video is digitally processed, the real and virtual world get mixmastered together creating a slightly-creepy semi-opaque character that brings to mind Princess Leia beseeching young Luke for help from R2D2.

This is a concept that words don't really explain. Check out Engadget's video to get a virtual sense of, well, the virtual: http://www.viddler.com/explore/engadget/videos/319/

Viewing your little walking, jumping baseball players requires a web browser, a webcam connected to your computer, Total Immersion's software, and the printed card with its access code. You start the software and the camera, enter the code, and let the camera read the tag embedded in the printed card and ... suddenly you have a little computer generated player hopping up and down in front of you.

Freaky.

But sort of cool too. Augmented reality is one more way that the boundaries of the flat screen and the flat paper are being blurred. For decades, we've been researching ways to integrate computer data into the real world and to understand how 3-D representation can change the way we interact with digital bytes.

The pragmatic uses are application like modeling - no, not as in Gisele Bundchen or Karolina Kurkova, but as in developing a mathematical representation of an object that may or may not exist in reality yet and presenting it as a 3-D wire frame or skinned object. It is a tool for taking a CAD drawing and creating a 3-D virtual object that can be rotated and viewed in different ways as part of the design and education process.

For example, architects use 3-D models to more accurately show the feel of proposed buildings and grounds. Scientists use 3-D models of chemical compounds and genetic strands to better understand their dynamics. Health care deploys 3-D rendered models of human organs for training and study. The automotive industry creates 3-D rendered vehicle models as one stage in the design process. The list goes on and on. And augmented reality takes modeling one step further.

Augmented reality has a lot of consumer appeal too. It is as gee-whiz as holograms once were and it lets our minds make the leap from flat to true spatial 3D.

At the Los Angeles Auto Show last November, Nissan used Total Immersion's technology as part of its launch materials for its new Cube line of vehicles. It handed out four informational cards, and when the card went in front of a webcam and computer with Total Immersion's software ... pow, a little red and very boxy SUV/van/car vehicle appeared in your hand. Kinda' like a pop-up book ... but CG video instead.

Making the leap from product pragmatic to baseball cards, however, took Hollywood imagination. Former Disney exec Michael Eisner and his company Tornante purchased the 140 year old Topps in 2007 after a nearly year-long saga that included the equivalent of an investment fistfight with trading card rival UpperDeck. When the dust settled, Eisner's vision of "transforming Topps into a sports media company" became the game plan. And augmented reality is one of its aspects.

Augmented reality! Hey, does anything else say Spring better than having San Francisco Giant's pitcher Tim Lincecum, Baltimore outfielder Nick Markakis, or Philadelphia's first baseman Ryan Howard (see previously linked video) swinging, catching, and even interacting with each other on the palm of your hand? Yeah, it's still a little weird for me too.

Somehow, in a month where a major metro printed newspaper (The Seattle Times) dropped its print edition totally and became an all online news source, it seems oddly fitting that baseball cards are leaving paper behind too. Something new is blooming and, augmented, or not, the season has turned and there's no going back.

And yet the balls still fly and the bats still swing and the grass still grows on the very real field. Our love of the crowd, the scent, the sound is intact -- and that is the blessing of spring, no matter what medium we choose to express it through. So bring on the augmented reality ... and let's play ball.