AR

Roughly two years ago there was big hype around Augmented Reality, the main driving force behind this was the transition from augmented reality being bound to desktop software to the ARToolkit being ported for Flash and therefor able to run in the browser. I jumped on the band wagon and wrote some samples in AS3 using the FLARToolkit which is an as3 port of the ARToolkit and the results were very nice. Thats pretty much where it ended.

In the last couple of weeks I have had more and more request for code that involves augmented reality. Most notably a project involving a wide open space being mapped as an AR maze. The challenge is to have a persistant 3d virtual maze to walk around. I am not sure if it is even possible with the equipment we have here but I have begun testing some ideas.

The video above is the first experiment in a long time involving AR. I wanted to check how well processing would handle the ARToolkit instead of Flash. I used the wrapper class of the NYARtoolkit as a base but I found the adaptation by cpbotha.net who has added multiple marker functionality to the library. The end result is a lot slower than i remember AS3 to be but I am loading an .STL file with 97000 triangles. I am using the unlekker library to load the .STL file but I am thinking about using the  OBJLoader library instead because of the texture support.

The .STL was a download from thingiverse.com. I can’t find the name of the person to credit anymore but the  file is called doneShell.stl