Augmented Reality on iPhone using ARToolKitPlus
Augmented reality can be qualified as a "hot topic" in IT, especially since the arrival of all the phone on steroids (iPhone, Android ...) as I like to call them. I'm working on a small application which uses ARToolKitPlus and the new camera APIs of the iPhone SDK4 to display 3D objects in augmented reality. You'll find in this post a video showing how it looks like for now and some explanations about augmented reality. Also I'll release the code under GPL (as ARToolKitPlus is) soon , so stay tuned !
Augmented reality
"Augmented reality (AR) is a term for a live direct or indirect view of a physical real-world environment whose elements are augmented by virtual computer-generated imagery" - Wikipedia page For now, there are two manners of doing augmented reality:
- The first one is using the positioning of the person and the direction he is looking at to overlay pertinent informations.
- The second is using markers, when a marker is detected a virtual object is displayed over it, the behavior of the object is the same as if the marker was a table it was stuck on.
I had the opportunity to work on both methods for iPhone but today i'm going to tell you about the second one.
iPhone app
I made a small iPhone app using ARToolKitPlus for the marker detection and OpenGL ES for the displaying of the 3D object. Moreover, I used the new camera APIs released in SDK4 - take a look at this post if you want to know more - which make the process of capturing images from the camera very fast. Here is how it looks like for now :
The display of the video and of the object are realized in two different threads, this way the video is always fluid and we have a better user experience. I still have some works to do on the code before getting something I can release, but if you are interested you can watch the blog or follow me on twitter to be the first to know when I'll put all this on github ;-) And if you want to ask questions don't hesitate to post comments.
bbye
Ben