For a project I was reviewing a number of WebGL engines. As WebGL is rather similar to OpenGL ES 2.0 there are numerous reasons to use an engine rather than rolling your own code. And there is plenty of choice of WebGL engines. Also reviews of WebGL engines can be found aplenty on the web, with varying depth and also scope here and here. Now, I would like to throw one in the mix that focuses on AR in conjunction with WebGL.
we would like to invite you to the 8th Winter Augmented Reality Meeting (WARM2013) to be held on February 13-14, 2013 in Graz, Austria. WARM is a workshop plus optional skiing event (February 15-17, 2013). It was founded in 2005 and has since grown in numbers of attendees each year.
Our team of the ICG will attend with 14 people. Even I am already having a large number of appointments, I am happy to meet up with you. Just email me!
SSTT NFT is one of the tracking modules in SSTT core. Originally SSTT was conceived to replace the venereal ARToolkit as the standard tracker in osgART. Hence, the original implementation did only consider marker tracking but already abstracted tracking targets, localization and tracking on a higher level. The video below shows a prototype of SSTT with natural feature tracking using a non-optimized SURF descriptor. Due to the rather heavy weight implementation of using SURF without additional optimizations this part is not viable for the mobile version of SSTT.
This project shows a tight convergence between real and virtual using Augmented Reality in combination with physics simulation. As usage scenario we looked at early physics education. And who doesn't love the original The Incredible Machine. So the final outcome was a small authoring tool with an example game that we honorable called the "The Interesting Mechanism". One can add new objects, build ramps, puzzles and levels.
SSTT Simple Cube is a demonstrator application to test the feasibility of vision based Augmented Reality on a larger set of devices. The app itself is not doing anything exciting except that it was the first fast vision based AR demo on the Android Market.
Supported Devices
Any ARM based device with Android 2.2 and higher and with a camera.
SSTT visualizer is a viewer application for 3D models enabled with Augmented Reality. It demonstrates the capabilities of the SSTT library. SSTT visualizer augments rectangular symbols in the environment and can be used for a variety of application areas ranging from engineering to medical visualization where 3D prototypes need to be presented within the real environment.
SSTT mobile is a subset of SSTT core optimized for mobile devices. It currently supports only marker tracking, skin and face recognition. SSTT mobile can be used and deployed on a number of devices as listed below. SSTT mobile was originally developed for Windows Mobile 5 and 6 ported to Android, Maemo, iOS and Symbian. Only the iOS, Maemo and especially the Android port are being continued.
SSTT - (Simplified Spatial Target Tracker) is a computer vision based tracking library for Augmented and Mixed Reality applications. It is a versatile and lean system suitable for desktop and embedded systems such as mobile phones. The basic variant implements numerous model based computer vision tracking algorithms with approaches ranging from traditional markers, ID based frames, rectangular textured targets to natural feature recognition (sometimes wrongly referred to as marker-less tracking). SSTT also allows for occlusion based interaction with tracking targets to provide higher interactivity in AR based user interfaces. Newer versions of SSTT add skin, face and shape recognition in order to make SSTT more versatile.
osgART is a cross platform toolkit for developing AR applications with the OpenSceneGraph API. osgART was invented by Julian Looser and then made by Raphael Grasset and Hartmut Seichter into a robust software framework with hundreds of useful features. The current working version is 2.x and is available from the osgART Website. osgART is been used in hundreds if not thousands of AR applications in research, education and commercial applications. It is most likely the most used open source AR application framework.
This was a consulting project for a company in the AR industry. The goal was to demonstrate the capabilities of SLAM based tracking even on rather low powered hardware. For this purpose a port of MiniPTAM targeting the N900 was created. The goal was to demonstrate if PTAM runs sufficiently fast on the N900 and optimized to the point of running at similar frame rates as on the iPhone. Additionally some effort was put into the project to paralellize the tracking to free up more time per frame for more advanced rendering and other interface enhancements.
PresentAR was developed to shorten the development cycle for AR based advertising. At that time desktop based novelty AR became quite popular and the HIT Lab NZ company, now Motim Technologies needed a quick way to satisfy their customers needs for presenting content such as animated characters, video and the like on tracking targets. Additionally, it was required that the application will have to run on Windows and Mac OS X. Based on that I developed PresentAR which is a conglomerate of OpenSceneGraph, osgART and wxWidgets hold together by a number of auxiliary libraries.
Rovio Augmented Reality was a project in close collaboration with wowwee. In the early stages of the development of the Rovio platform the good guys at wowwee approached the HIT Lab NZ to build Augmented Reality games. This project went from the drafting phase of Rovio to the very final version of the robot. However, it is still not clear how to build compelling AR games with AR mediated telepresence as other projects later have shown.
ComposAR is a framework for developing desktop Augmented Reality applications. The framework consist of a wrapper around OpenSceneGraph and osgART called osgSWIG. ComposAR allows to be adapted into a variety of end user application, spanning from a stand-alone editor and viewer up to an integrated system inside of Pure Data.
Benchworks is a collaborative Augmented Reality application that facilitates in-situ and remote collaboration on urban design proposals. Two users can seamlessly observe virtual and real objects for design purposes. The system was created to test the feasibility of Augmented Reality aided design collaborations in a studio setting.
sketchand+ is the outcome of my final Diplom project as an Architect with Specialization in CAAD at the Bauhaus University, Weimar. My vision was to integrate an emerging technology with the existing workflow in order to support the early stages of design, in particular sketching. Following through with this vision I developed a collaborative augmented reality application for sketching and formal investigation.
