www.youtube.com/watch?v=mrbowA1Atac

June onwards should be interesting times for iPhone owners as we should start to see some really interesting solutions being created.

Related posts:

1. Real-time tracking and Layar 4?
2. Augmented Reality iPhone – June Stats
3. Face Tracking is Beyond Reality

They have put together an interesting video on publishing via AutoDesk and viewing the AR content.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=9FxlP5nUqIM

More about AR-Media

With AR-media™ Plugin, Autodesk® 3dsMax® users can now experiment with the power of Augmented Reality inside this incredible 3d modeling software. Simply stated, the Augmented Reality technology  allows users to visualize their 3D creations directly in the real physical space which surrounds them. Indeed, through ARMedia™ Plugin, 3dsMax® models can be visualized out of the digital workspace directly on users’ desktop or in any physical location, by connecting a simple webcam and by printing a  suitable code. By means of the AR-media™ Exporter users can create and publish augmented reality files autonomously. Files created by the Exporter can be visualized on any computer with the freely available AR-media™ Player, without the need of having Autodesk® 3dsMax® and the Plugin installed. Users can now create their own 3dsMax® Augmented Reality models and distribute them to their clients as independent, stand-alone files and let their clients experience such models in Augmented Reality in a click.

The bundle provides users with an advanced visualization functionality which serves two main purposes in the design life cycle:

- Help to study and analize virtual prototypes in real environments
- Communicate 3D projects immersively and astonishingly

All you need to make AR-media™ Plugin & Exporter work is a personal computer, a webcam and a printed code attached to the software. A wide range of Head Mounted Displays, including the Vuzix® CamAR, eMagin, i-glasses™ are also supported.

http://www.inglobetechnologies.com/en/products/arplugin_su/info.php

Related posts:

1. Augmented Reality Tools Now Free From metaio
2. Augmented Reality In One Hour
3. iPhone Augmented Reality Marker Tracking

Never as accurate as this

I sent my brother-in-law who is a London Taxi driver out with Layar and Wikitude and asked him to use them both for a day. While he loved them, after a bit he constantly complained that the applications were reporting incorrect locations, and the locations would jump around, sometimes being in front of him, and other times were appearing behind him.

Of course the problem is not with the augmented reality applications which take advantage of the phones in-built compass, but rather with the phones compass itself.

It may come as a surprise too many of you that the accuracy of the compass differs between models of devices, the accuracy is also affected by objects that are placed next to the device, even whether or not the keyboard is open. (I didn’t know about that one). You try explaining to a user that their £300 phone is not accurate and it’s not the software.

3 different readings, so which is it?

Fortunately after failing to convince my brother-in-law where the problem lies, Daniele at Peer Internet Solutions has put together a great video showing the problem and the differences across several device. It’s interesting if you are building augmented reality applications and wondering why you are not getting the accuracy you were expecting, or if you’re trying to convince a stubborn brother-in–law that going camping and taking nothing but a pen knife and an iPhone for navigation is not a good idea.

Peer Internet Solutions have an open source augmented reality engine called Mixare, which is available for the Google Android and soon for the iPhone. Take a look at their website for more info and check out their compass accuracy report below.

Related posts:

1. Mobile Augmented Reality – The Marmite Problem
2. AR Browsers Head To Head – Test 2
3. Wikitude 4 For The Android With Video

Some of the audience members were in favour of building plug-ins and I can see the attraction. Products like Layar and Wikitude provide you with the application leaving you only to worry about your POIs. If you are not a marketing expert then you also have the opportunity to take advantage of their vast number of users with out doing a thing.

With all these benefits there must be some drawbacks? Yes there are:

• Complexity: if you are looking for a solution that goes beyond clicking on a POI and displaying data then building a plug-in is not for you. For the time being at least forget an augmented reality version of Pac Man.

• Discoverability: Layar have 10 pages of layars in their UI, if you build a plug-in where will yours be? If you are listed on page 10 will you really get that exposure to the entire user base?

• Money: until recently building a plug-in meant it was free but Layar announced at MWC that from later this month developers will have the opportunity to create paid for layers. Great news for developers, I’m not sure what the revenue model is for this yet as I can’t find any info, but one would assume that Apple will take 30% of the in app purchase and Layar will take percentage as well. So what will developers be left with?

• Prestige: this very much depends on how you want your application to be found. If you are happy with a user clicking on another application before they launch yours then plug-ins are perfect. However if you want a user to click your Icon on the device then plug-ins are not for you

The other option is building an application yourself; the obvious benefits are you control everything and if your application is chargeable you keep a lions share of the money, but it’s not without its draw backs either:

• Bug fixes: You are responsible for fixing those and getting your app though the appstore process

• Marketing: If being on page 10 of an applications plug-in list is a problem, where will you be in the appstore?

But probably the hardest issue to address is how do you get started? Suddenly you need to worry about retrieving your location, which way is the user facing, and just how do I put data in to the camera view.  In my talk I was largely on the create you own app side of the fence. Building plug-ins is fine if your data is simple and doesn’t warrent being it’s own application, or you don’t have the skills, or dare I say if you don’t care about it enough to want to market it as yours.

In the real world the problem is often how do I extend my existing geo aware application to include augmented reality, and perhaps more importantly, how do I add the functionality quickly and easily without a major rewrite. Neither of the two solutions above deals with that problem but fortunately there is now a 3rd option that does.

Wikitude have release  an api to enable iPhone developers to easily extend or build new standalone applications and include augmented reality functionality. It’s the best of both worlds because the application is yours, users will launch the application using your icon, you take responsibility for the marketing, you control the price etc, and because you are using the tried and tested Wikitude framework it makes develpment a snap.

The framework which is also available for the Android takes the worry out of building applications by doing all the hard work for you, so much of the hard work that we asked the Mobilizy guys to create a new application around football and then set them the challenge of adding augmented reality to extend the application. Nicola took us up on the challenge and said that it took about 30 minutes to extend the application to include the new functionality, which you have to say is pretty impressive.

To demonstrate how easy it really is take a look at the video below:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=XAqOQvmpZHQ

To begin building your own augmented reality applications for mobile, visit  wikitude.org/developers where you can get the API and the sample FIFA project, then follow the 4 simple steps:

• Add the WikitudeAPI-Folder containing the Static Library, Public Headers and Resources to your iPhone-Project in Xcode.

• Add additional frameworks to your project and make changes to the linker flags (details are found in the API documentation)

• Within your custom application, create a new WikitudeARViewController with your registration data – this ViewController returns the camera view.

• Add your data as POI array and start the view

The final step is to tell us at Augmented Planet what you build and your experience with the API.
So, while the debate over create a plug-in or write your own will continue, it has become a lot easier to go down the build your own route. Thanks to the Wikitude API you can have your own icon and eat it too.

Related posts:

1. Attention developers building mobile applications for Android, iPhone, bada and Symbian.
2. Augmented Reality In One Hour
3. Augmented Reality Driving Applications

Chetan also talks about the choices in selecting a platform and his plans for porting applications over to Android. It’s an interesting talk, the Q&A at the end has lots of questions on where the data comes from and how to manage the presentation of lots of data on the screen. So if you are planning on building an augmented reality application and want some tips from a company that have 10 augmented reality apps already in the iPhone store,  or if you are just generally interested in learning more about the technology then its well worth a listen.

Watch the webcast

www.youtube.com/watch?v=AsTFPoK0Gbk

Related posts:

1. Over The Air 09 And O’Reilly Webcast
2. Build Mobile Augmented Reality Applications In 1 Hour
3. Augmented Reality Events – April – June (Updated)

1. Gamaray doesn’t use OpenGL, the 3D objects are all rendered in software. This means the application will never support the kind of animations or textures found in Layar and Wikitude 3D.
2. Much of the code is not very well thought out and I don’t plan on spending any time explaining it.
3. I don’t plan on supporting an open source project, someone else will need to upload it to a repository and manage the updates.

You can get hold of the source code here: http://groups.google.com/group/gamaray/files
If you want to see Gamaray in action read here: http://www.augmentedplanet.com/2009/08/augmented-tourisum/ 

Best of luck to the Gamaray guys, we wish them well in their next venture.

Related posts:

1. Augmented Tourisum
2. mixare – A New Augmented Reality Engine For Android
3. The New Yell AR Browser

You’ll see I have changed the theme today, I hope you like it. Trying to put the business directory in the other theme turned in to a personal nightmare, this one is a bit easier to work with. Getting the directory up and running is my next task.

It’s been a long long long time since I wrote any interesting code, it’s a shame really as being an augmented reality evangelist would have been a fantastic job. You know the kind of thing where you turn up at a conference and speak for an hour about building applications. Oh well those were the days. 

In the meantime, we have seen some fantastic augmented reality demos, if you are curious about how you build an augmented reality application here is an excellent walk-through video.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jU6PcBS1pWw

Related posts:

1. Create your own augmented reality music Video
2. Augmented Reality Business Directory Now Live
3. Create your own World in the Wikitude World Competition