Tuesday, April 14, 2009

FLARToolKit - 3D Flash augmented Reality

During the recent Web 2.0 conference in San Francisco, I was lucky enough to get to attend and work the booth for Adobe in the Expo area. A lot of people hate booth duty but I personally love it. It's really where we get the best, most honest responses from members of the public, and it gives us a chance to poll how our corporate image is fairing.

At the booth, I demoed FLARToolKit. FLARToolKit (source code) is an AS3 version of ARToolKit. ARToolKit was a C library that enabled augmented reality; however the Adobe Flash/Flex/AIR compatible version, FLARToolKit, is not merely a port of the original C version. FLARToolKit is ported from a Java, version which is called NyARToolKit. (NyARToolKit seems to execute much faster than the original C version after the great effort of nyatla.)

FLARToolkit will detect the marker from an input image and calculate the camera position in three-dimension space. Something like Helper library are planned, but further processing (like synthesizing the 3D Graphics) needs to implemented by yourself. You can try a demo of it here at General Electric.

While at the booth, we got awarded the "Best in Show" award from Web Professional Minute, sponsored by Peachpit Press. This image links to the video.




My colleague Lee Brimelow took the concept one step further and has now produced an excellent tutorial on how to use the FLARTookKit for AS3 (Flash/Flex/AIR) developers.



If you haven't seen Lee Brimelow's GoToAndLearn website, it is a must see.

2 comments:

  1. I created a chat where people can help each other to use Augmented Reality. Please share this link! Filling the chat with people could take some months but i am sure we can create a good community!

    AR-CHAT

    ReplyDelete
  2. hellooo ! i'm teresa and i'm from Portugal. I study Multimedia and I'm creating a project about Augmented Reality.
    This tutorial is excelent. I could make the three cubes. But now i want to make a plane and i have problems. I can make it appear only for one second. Could it be possible send you the code for you to see and tell me if there is some mistake?

    Thank you!

    ReplyDelete

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