• Augmented reality is a mixture of the two and is an exciting technology that holds many possibilities for use in day to day life.
• Heads up display in automobiles provide additional information regarding the vehicle, location, direction, areas of interest, etc.
• NFL has a first down marker which shows up yellow on TV, but not when in the stadium.
• NHL uses a red line to mark the motion of the puck for TV, to make the puck more visible for the audience at home.
• Museums are using more dynamic listening devices that are not guided tours, but guide-less tours. Wander through the museum to points of interest and the device recognizes your location and begins to provide additional information.

Though the devices required seem to be 'exotic', it is actually very standard. A fancy headset is not required. Most of us have these technologies with us daily... a simple cell phone!

The level of certainty can be adjusted to accomodate for faster renderings, but with less accuracy.

FLARToolKit is AS3 version of ARToolKit. But it is not ported from the original C version but ported from Java version which is called NyARToolKit. (NyARToolKit seems to executes much faster than the original C version after the great effort of nyatla)

FLARToolkit will detect the marker from input image and calculate the camera position in the three dimension space. Something like Helper library are planned to add but further processing like synthesize the 3D Graphics needs to implemented by yourself.” This abstract was taken from the FLARToolKit website located at http://www.libspark.org/wiki/saqoosha/FLARToolKit/en For displaying the 3D images FLARToolKit uses the Papervision3D 2.0 library.

The FLARToolKit demo that we took to study off of was written in actionscript as stated above. The goal that we tried to achieve was to import our own objects into a flash based AR. The simple cube demo allowed us to do this. It had the simple functionality of being able to detect a marker and display a 3D image on top of it. There were only a few places needing adjustment to customize it for our own objects and markers.

To create our own marker we use the pattern creator provided with the C version of the ARToolkit. It launches a webcam window and tries to locate a marker inside of the image. Then all we have to do is click the mouse button once the marker is located in the window and give it a file name. Once the pattern is created we just need to replace the pattern name in the actionscript.

Replacing the 3D object is as simple as creating an object from our exported 3D model, explanation on that below, and adding it to the base node.

Implementing objects

1. Create model in Blender
   1. Model using primitives or vertexes if more detail were wanted.
   2. Join objects together so exports as one object
   3. If texture is needed unwrap using smart projections
      1. Export texture layout, add textures to faces in editing software.
      2. Open image in uv image editor window in blender
   4. Export object using the Actionscript plugin in Blender
      1. Leave the package name blank, give it a class name.
      2. Select Papervision3D 2.0 from dropdown box.
      3. Select a location and click export.
2. Move generated .as file into folder with main actionscript file
3. In main actionscript file under any imports type import *.as; (* denotes class name)
4. Create an object of the imported class type.
   1. The objects are inherited from the triangleMesh class this means they can be manipulated in the same way.
   2. Created a scaleAll() method to adjust the size of the objects when rendered.
5. Add the object to the baseNode via baseNode.addChild(obj)

The ARToolKit works on Mac, not sure if it works on PC.

The file mk_patt is the executable.

After the model is created texturing needs to be done. In Blender you are able to “unwrap” the model onto a flat plane so that you can apply textures to each face. This UV unwrapping can be tricky, but the best way to do it for our purposes was to select the object, go into edit mode (tab), and hit the “U” key, and then selecting “unwrap (smart projections).” That lays the squares out as evenly as possible. Then you can save the uv layout to a .tga file and make your texture off of that.