Augmented Reality Sandbox

I recently received a call from an outdoor education school looking for help in creating an "augmented reality sandbox"... Now that was a voicemail that got my attention!  I ended up having to leave a message on their end and may have turned them off after saying I'd be happy to help if they didn't mind having it done in linux rather than OS X (as they wanted) for technical reasons. I'm guessing that they gave up on it or went elsewhere, I should probably try them back at some point (maybe they just don't know they can run linux on their Macs).

Poking around a bunch on the UC Davis site they'd cited as inspiration, I found myself wanting to build this thing for my own purposes, which would involve trying to recreate old TSR module landscapes a la my B2 Sketchup exercise, only maybe this time I'd be able to plop minis right down into the scene if I could get the scale right. I haven't researched this - I imagine a ton of table top wargamers are way ahead of me..? Mind you I reckon this would run a couple thousand dollars and take a lot more spare time than I have to put together. I really should call those folks back, huh?

East Carolina University's Geology department has a nice video of one of these sandboxes up and running.